Oil Prices, Scarcity, and Geographies of War

Abstract

Many commentators warn that oil scarcity increases the likelihood of war; we question this simplistic concept of scarcity-driven wars. Questioning the relationship between violence, scarcity, and oil begins from reconsidering the causal relationship between high prices and war: Wars can arise in the context of low prices, and the oil-related dimensions of conflicts that occur in the context of high oil prices cannot be solely reduced to struggles over dwindling resources. Based on a succinct review of recent studies, a discussion of major hypotheses, and a brief case study of Sudan, we suggest that scarcity is in part a narrative constructed for and through prices. Power relations resulting in massive financial windfalls mediate this narrative and its selective geographies of war and peace. We outline several hypotheses, and—drawing on critical geopolitics and political ecology—explore avenues for further studies incorporating spatially disaggregated analyses.