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How do ethnic and confessional identities become the basis for political mobilization? In this episode, Arbella Bet-Shlimon examines the long history of Iraq's first oil city, Kirkuk, to argue that the rise of ethnicized politics was by no means inevitable. She shows how a multilingual city long shared by Arabic, Turkish, and Kurdish-speaking communities transformed under Ottoman and British colonial rule, and how the political economy of oil shaped the city's politics in the twentieth century. In so doing, she sheds light on a question that should resonate far beyond Iraq: what does it mean for a conflict to be "about oil?" What does this explanation illuminate, and what does it obscure?