The paper that I propose to present at the 2015 MESA meeting is part of a panel on the political economy of upheaval and war. Oil is, of course, a central aspect of the political economy of the region, and has had a role both in countries that have experienced serious conflict (Libya, Iraq, Bahrain, Syria) and in countries in which the Arab Spring did not generate widespread violence (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, Oman). The paper will contribute to our understanding of the political economy of conflict in two ways, one methodological, the other substantive. My methodological argument concerns how we ought to draw on the lessons of other parts of the world when trying to understand the causal impact of natural resource rents on conflict (or its absence) in the region. Specifically, I focus on the role of conditionality in understanding the resource curse. A conditional argument is one in which the causal mechanism (in this case, a causal mechanism by which rents affect civil war) occurs in only a subset of possible cases. Scholars who write on the resource curse very frequently assert that the underlying causal mechanisms are conditional, but tend to employ large-n methodologies that do not adequately account for these conditionalities. If the resource curse is conditional (and most think it is) then the appropriate methods for studying it are small-n comparisons and within case strategies, such as process-tracing. In the empirical, second, part of the paper, I turn to the existing, and rich, literature on natural resource rents and civil conflict in other regions, especially Sub-Saharan Africa. I show how we can use the findings of this literature to understand the conflicts in the post-Arab Spring Middle East, and that this is best done by paying close attention to specific causal mechanisms, and how they might, or might not, apply to specific cases in the Arab world. The effect of oil rents on political outcomes will vary across the cases, and our methods should reflect this fact of the political world.