Oil and Territorial Sovereignty: The Separate Independence of Colonial Areas

• In Event: Poster Session: Politics and History & International History and Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: International History and Politics (IHAP)

Abstract

Why did some colonial areas become a sovereign state individually, while others were integrated into a larger entity? Numerous existing studies on state-formation and the sovereign state system discuss related issues, but the territorial scope of postcolonial states is often left unexplained. Among many factors that potentially affected the decolonization outcome, this paper focuses on the role of natural resources. Natural resources have triggered conflicts both between and within nation-states, sometimes destabilizing their territoriality and the sovereign state system. There is a considerable amount of research on the effects of natural resources on various contemporary political issues including territorial disputes and secessionism. A less studied topic, however, is how natural resources have affected the creation of new sovereign states. Departing from previous studies, this study reconsiders the history of state formation in resource-rich former colonies and provides new insights regarding the historical foundation of nation-states with large resource endowments.
Focusing primarily on arguably the most significant natural resource, oil, this paper identifies two INUS (insufficient but necessary part of a condition which is itself unnecessary but sufficient for the result) conditions for the separate independence of colonial areas, which refers to the situation in which a colonial area becomes independent as it is without becoming part of a larger entity. Namely, it argues that 1) pre-independence oil production and 2) the colonial administration system built on the pre-existing local political order resulted in the separate independence of colonial areas, thus avoiding a merger with neighboring regions. It develops this argument through two sets of comparative historical analyses on colonial areas on the island of Borneo and in the Persian Gulf.
This study contributes to two bodies of literature. First, it provides a new perspective to the international relations literature on state-formation by explaining the territorial scope of the entity that would become a sovereign state, which previous studies tended to treat as given. Second, it questions and revises the assumption of the exogeneity of sovereignty in the literature on the politics of natural resources by demonstrating that natural resources affected the process in which sovereign states came to exist.

Author

• Naosuke Mukoyama, University of Cambridge