Thomas Richter

Why do some oil exporters experience civil war but others do not?: investigating the conditional effects of oil

According to quantitative studies, oil seems the only natural resource that is robustly linked to civil war onset. However, recent debates on the nexus of oil and internal conflict have neglected the fact that there are a number of peaceful rentier oil states in existence. Few efforts have been made to explain why some oil-exporting countries have experienced civil war while others have not. We thus address this puzzle, by arguing that civil war risks depend on the specific conditions of oil production and how they come to structure state–society relations. Specifically, we expect that states that are either highly dependent on oil or who have problematic relations with oil regions are prone to civil war. However, these risks will be mitigated either when democratic institutions can manage conflicts peacefully or when abundant oil revenues can be spent in such a way as to buy peace. We test this conditional argument by comparing 39 net oil exporters, using a (crisp-set) Qualitative Comparative Analysis – a methodology particularly suited to test conditional relationships in medium- N samples. Our results largely confirm our conditional hypotheses. Conditions of oil production are ambiguous, and particular combinations thus explain the onset of civil war. Specifically, we find that high abundance is sufficient to ensure peace, while two distinct pathways lead to civil war: the combination of high dependence and low abundance, as well as the overlap of ethnic exclusion and oil reserves in non-abundant and non-democratic oil states.

Sectoral Transformations in Neo-Patrimonial Rentier States: Tourism Development and State Policy in Egypt

This article challenges claims that liberalising state regulated markets in developing countries may induce lasting economic development. The analysis of the rise of tourism in Egypt during the last three decades suggests that the effects of liberalisation and structural adjustment are constrained by the neo-patrimonial character of the Egyptian political system. Since the decline of oil rent revenues during the 1980s tourism development was the optimal strategy to compensate for the resulting fiscal losses. Increasing tourism revenues have helped in coping with macroeconomic imbalances and in avoiding more costly adjustment of traditional economic sectors. Additionally, they provided the private elite with opportunities to generate large profits. Therefore, sectoral transformations due to economic liberalisation in neo-patrimonial Rentier states should be described as a process, which has led to the diversification of external rent revenues, rather than to a general downsizing of the Rentier character of the economy.

Why do Some Oil Exporters Experience Civil War but Others Do Not? A Qualitative Comparative Analysis of Net Oil-Exporting Countries

According to quantitative studies, oil is the only resource that is robustly linked to civil war onset. However, recent debates on the nexus of oil and civil war have neglected that there are a number of peaceful oil-rentier states, and few efforts have been spent to explain why some oilexporting countries have experienced civil war and others have not. Methodologically, the debate has been dominated by research using either quantitative methods or case studies, with little genuine medium-N comparison. This paper aims to fill this gap by studying the conditions of civil war onset among net oil exporters using (crisp-set) Qualitative Comparative Analysis (csQCA). Considering a sample of 44 net oil exporters between 1970 and 2008, we test conditions such as oil abundance (per capita) and dependence, the interaction of ethnic exclusion and oil reserve locations (overlap) as well as the type of political regime (polity). Our results point to a combination of necessary and sufficient conditions that has been largely ignored until now: low abundance is a necessary condition of civil war onset. Two pathways lead to civil war: first, a combination of low abundance and high dependence and, second, a combination of low abundance and the geographical overlap of ethnic exclusion with oil reserve areas within autocracies.

Durable, Yet Different: Monarchies in the Arab Spring

Abstract Over three years into the Arab Spring, the Middle East is characterized by a striking difference in durability between monarchies and republics. Beyond this difference, some significant gaps within the group of the eight Middle East monarchies have so far been overlooked. Drawing on the existing monarchy research, we first make the case that there were three distinct types of durable monarchies prior to the Arab Spring. Confronted with social and political crises, each type reacted differently to the challenges presented to them after 2011. While five “rentier” and “dynastic” Gulf monarchies (Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE (United Arab Emirates)) mainly rely on material distribution and family rule, the non-oil “linchpins” of Jordan and Morocco, attracting additional external funds, undertook constitutional changes in an attempt at procedural legitimation. The Sultanate of Oman, however, falls in between. This “linchtier” monarchy used modest material cooptation, a selected personal reshuffling at the top of the regime as well as targeted institutional adaptations. We illustrate our findings with similarly structured brief case studies of the three prototypes of Qatar, Jordan and Oman.

When do Autocracies Start to Liberalize Foreign Trade? Evidence from Four Cases in the Arab World

This paper argues that trade and capital account reforms within autocracies underlie the primacy of foreign currency procurement. A longitudinal comparison of four countries (Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt and Jordan) in the Middle East and North Africa region shows a historical sequencing of reforms. In the 1960s and 1970s, the foreign exchange scarcity was managed primarily by rising restrictions, accumulation of debt and a number of unilateral country-specific strategies, including broader economic openings (infitah) and isolated capital account liberalizations. However, IMF-friendly reforms (orthodox trade liberalization) only became a political option in the context of the extreme fiscal scarcity of the 1980s and 1990s, after the failure of these earlier policies and the drying up of alternative unconditional finance. Additionally, the time differences regarding when orthodox reforms are implemented within autocracies mainly relate to global and regional cycles of different external windfall gains. These findings complement recent debates about the rush to free trade in at least two regards. First, they point to distinct causal mechanisms depending on the type of political regime (for example, autocracy versus democracy), explaining the beginning of trade and capital account liberalizations among developing countries. Second, they reveal the conditional historical influence of neoliberal ideas among structurally similar autocracies.

State hydrocarbon rents, authoritarian survival and the onset of democracy: Evidence from a new dataset

This article surveys the effects of state hydrocarbon rents—defined as government income from oil and natural gas—on authoritarian survival and the onset of democracy. We also examine the association of changing state hydrocarbon rents with state spending and taxation based on a new collection of historical data, the Global State Revenues and Expenditures dataset. Using these novel data, we provide evidence that increasing state rents from oil and gas hinder democratization by reducing citizens’ tax burden. However, an increase in the oil and gas income flowing directly into state coffers does not appear to lower the average risk of ouster by rival authoritarian elites. We have found no evidence of the systematic distributional effects of state hydrocarbon income on regime survival.

Policy Diffusion among Democracies and Autocracies: A Comparison of Trade Reforms and Nuclear Energy Policy

This paper reviews the existing comparative literature with regard to differences and similarities of policy diffusion between democratic and authoritarian regimes. There has been an extensive discussion of causes and effects of policy diffusion for democracies, but the literature on autocracies lacks similar focus and scope. Similarly, research on the patterns and causes of policies’ diffusion across regime types is virtually non-existent. After some theoretical considerations about regime effects on diffusion in the first part of this paper, we analyse data on foreign trade regulations and nuclear power plants and compare results across regime types. Based on cross-time cross-section regression models, we can show that, depending on the specific policy field, regime type is of less importance for diffusion processes than theoretically expected. This highlights a need for further detailed research on the general role of regime type regarding policy diffusion.

When do autocracies start to liberalize foreign trade? Evidence from four cases in the Middle East and North Africa

ABSTRACT This paper argues that within autocracies the beginning of IMF-friendly trade and capital account reforms is highly contingent on the ability of alternative policy regulations to provide respective regimes with domestically needed amounts of convertible foreign exchange. A longitudinal comparison of four countries (Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt and Jordan) between the 1960s and the early 1990s in the Middle East and North Africa region shows a historical sequencing of reforms. Before the implementation of orthodox policy change, foreign exchange scarcity was managed primarily by rising restrictions, accumulation of debt and a number of unilateral country-specific strategies, including broader economic openings (infitah) and selective capital account liberalizations. However, IMF-friendly reforms only became a political option after the failure of these alternative policies and the simultaneous drying up of unconditional finance. These findings complement recent debates about the rush to free trade in at least two aspects. First, they point to distinct causal mechanisms depending on the type of political regime (e.g., autocracy versus democracy), explaining the beginning of trade and capital account liberalizations among developing nations. They specify, second, one important contextual condition in regard to the effectiveness of IMF surveillance power.