Oil Sparks Conflict Only Where Territorial Claims Overlap

Why Conflict Is So Rare?

Interstate war is uncommon not mainly because states always settle disputes peacefully but because many potential disputes never exist. Kyosuke Kikuta starts from this simple observation to ask where and when valuable resources actually translate into interstate violence: do oil discoveries raise the risk of conflict everywhere, or only in places where multiple states can plausibly claim the same territory?

Mapping Claimable Areas, 1946–2024

Kikuta constructs a new, comprehensive measure of states’ "claimable" areas for 1946–2024. The coding draws on three post–World War norms—territorial integrity, minority protection, and maritime sovereignty—to delineate the geographic extents where one or more states could plausibly lodge territorial claims. This geospatial measure is presented as a systematic way to capture the underlying presence or absence of serious interstate disputes.

Textbook Natural Experiments and Quasi-Experimental Tests

To test how claimability conditions resource-driven conflict, the study links the claimability map to a large proprietary dataset of oil exploration: over 600,000 wildcat drilling records provided by Enverus. Identification and estimation rely on natural experiments and difference-in-differences designs comparing outcomes before and after discoveries across areas with different claimability profiles. The replication package contains aggregated dyad-year files (individual well locations are proprietary).

Key Findings

• Fuel resources (oil discoveries) increase interstate conflict risk, but this effect appears only when discoveries occur in areas claimable by multiple states.
• Discoveries in clearly uncontested territory do not raise interstate conflict rates.
• Robustness checks include extensive validity tests, heterogeneity analyses, mechanism tests, and a most-similar case study that corroborates the causal logic.

What This Means for Territorial Norms and Conflict

The study supplies contemporary, systematic evidence that the geographic distribution of claimable territory conditions whether valuable resources provoke interstate violence. By measuring where serious disputes could exist, the research explains part of why interstate conflict is relatively rare and shows that resource bonanzas only matter for conflict when they intersect with overlapping territorial claims. The dataset and findings offer new tools for scholars studying territorial norms, resource wars, and geospatial drivers of interstate rivalry.