Fueling the Fire Jeff D. Colgan Pathways from Oil to War

Fueling the Fire Fueling the Fire Jeff D. Colgan Pathways from Oil to War

What roles do oil and energy play in international conºict? In public debates, the issue often pro- vokes signiªcant controversy. Critics of the two U.S.-led wars against Iraq (in 1991 and 2003) charged that they traded “blood for oil,” and that they formed a part of an American neo-imperialist agenda to control oil in the Middle East. The U.S. government, on the other hand, explicitly denied that the wars were about oil, especially in 2003. U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ar- gued that the war “has nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil,” a theme echoed by White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer.1 Political scientists have had remarkably little to say on the issue. Realist analyses of the causes of war, even those that speciªcally highlight the ability of states to acquire or extract resources, tend to say very little about oil and energy.2 Among the few scholars who do focus on the issue, there is little agree- ment. Some argue that “resource wars” are frequent and that oil plays a major causal role.3 Others cast doubt on the importance of such wars, pointing to the lack of systematic evidence.4 Policy analysts tend to focus narrowly on “en-

Jeff D. Colgan is Assistant Professor in the School of International Service at American University and author of Petro-Aggression: When Oil Causes War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

The author wishes to thank Boaz Atzili, Ken Conca, Alexander Downes, Charles Glaser, Llewelyn Hughes, Miles Kahler, Rose Kelanic, Elizabeth Saunders, and Caitlin Talmadge; seminar/panel participants at George Washington University and the 2012 annual meeting of the International Studies Association; and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. He is grateful for support from American University and the Woodrow Wilson Inter- national Center for Scholars.

1. Quoted in Doug Stokes, “Blood for Oil? Global Capital, Counter-insurgency, and the Dual Logic of American Energy Security,” Review of International Studies, Vol. 33, No. 2 (April 2007), p. 245. 2. Stephen Van Evera, Causes of War: Power and the Roots of Conºict (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999); and Jeffrey W. Taliaferro, “State Building for Future Wars: Neoclassical Realism and the Resource-Extractive State,” Security Studies, Vol. 15, No. 3 (July/September 2006), pp. 464–495. 3. Michael T. Klare, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (New York: Met- ropolitan, 2008); Michael T. Klare, Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum (New York: Metropolitan, 2004); Thomas F. Homer-Dixon, Envi- ronment, Scarcity, and Violence (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999); John W. Maxwell and Rafael Reuveny, “Resource Scarcity and Conºict in Developing Countries,” Journal of Peace Re- search, Vol. 37, No. 3 (May 2000), pp. 301–322; Daniel Moran and James Avery Russell, Energy Secu- rity and Global Politics: The Militarization of Resource Management (New York: Routledge, 2009); and Stokes, “Blood for Oil?” 4. Nils Petter Gleditsch, “Armed Conºict and the Environment: A Critique of the Literature,” Jour- nal of Peace Research, Vol. 35, No. 3 (May 1998), pp. 381–400; David G. Victor, “What Resource Wars?” National Interest, November 12, 2007, http://nationalinterest.org/article/what-resource- wars-1851; Emily Meierding, “Oil in Interstate Conºict: One More Thing to Fight About,” paper

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