Halvard Buhaug

It's the Local Economy, Stupid! Geographic Wealth Dispersion and Conflict Outbreak Location

Income varies considerably within countries and the locations where conflicts emerge are rarely typical or representative for states at large. Yet, most research on conflict has only examined national income averages and neglected spatial variation. The authors argue that civil conflicts are more likely to erupt in areas with low absolute income, even if a country’s gross domestic product (GDP) per capita is not necessarily low, and in areas with large deviations from national averages. The authors test these hypotheses empirically using spatially disaggregated data on the location of conflict outbreaks and per capita income estimates. The authors find that areas with absolute poverty indeed see more outbreaks of conflict, and they find some evidence that inequality increases the risk of conflict. Subnational information can improve on conventional country-based measures and help our understanding of how local features and variation can give rise to mobilization and violence.

Inequality, Grievances, and Civil War: From Horizontal Inequality to Civil War via Grievances

What would it take to show that grievances actually do cause political violence? In Chapter 2, we noted that it is difficult to measure grievances directly, at least if the empirical scope encompasses a large number of cases. Therefore, we opt for an indirect approach that identifies conditions under which grievances are likely to emerge. In particular, we posit that inequalities among groups correspond to such situations, and proceed by investigating whether they are related to the outbreak of civil war in the empirical chapters to follow. In this chapter, we propose a combination of theoretically grounded mechanisms that together constitute a causal pathway that connects inequalities with violent conflict through grievances. Without a direct test of the grievance mechanisms themselves, it is all the more important to bolster their credibility by showing that they can be derived from conceptually coherent and empirically validated theories. The main goal of this chapter is to construct a theoretical scheme that explains how inequalities cause violent conflict. Before doing so, however, it is appropriate to briefly introduce two key types of inequalities and their historical origins. Vertical and Horizontal Inequalities Our first task is to conceptualize inequality as a structural, asymmetric condition governing social relations among actors. Given Charles Tilly’s role as a prominent critic of grievance-based theorizing in general, and relative deprivation theory in particular, it may seem surprising to use one of his works as an initial source of inspiration for our theorizing. Yet, Tilly’s (1999) provocative book on Durable Inequality is a useful conceptual starting point because it helps overcome the problems afflicting the conventional conflict literature.

Inequality, Grievances, and Civil War: Inequality and Grievances in the Civil War Literature

This chapter surveys the literature on the link from inequality and grievances to civil war violence. As will become clear, the perceived validity of such factors has remained controversial in conflict research. After considering the classical literature, as well as some of the more recent writings in this area, we turn to a critique of the literatures that inform our own theory-building efforts in Chapter 3. Classical Contributions Given the obvious relevance of power and wealth distributions as potential sources of conflict, it is not surprising that inequality plays a central role in classical theories of civil war and revolution. In an influential article, Davies (1962) argued that revolutions were motivated by frustrations resulting from an evolving gap between individuals’ aspirations and their actual economic status. Also adopting an explicitly psychological perspective, Ted Robert Gurrs (1970) well-known theory of relative deprivation characterizes various types of collective violence as reactions to frustrations stemming from unfulfilled aspirations, usually related to material well-being (see review in Brush 1996). Such a perspective differs radically from earlier sociological theories of mob behavior that explained collective violence as a societal pathology (e.g., Le Bon 1913). Instead, relative deprivation theorists argue that individuals’ widespread discontent with their social situation triggers conflict, especially where modernization fuels a “revolution of rising expectations” (Davies 1962).

Inequality, Grievances, and Civil War: Economic Inequality and Civil War

Horizontal inequality concerns more than political power. Following Stewart (2008a), we have conceptualized it as a multidimensional concept in Chapter 3. Indeed, most studies of inequality evaluate the consequences of differences in wealth and income rather than in terms of political influence. As a complement to the previous chapter, we therefore continue our investigation of group-level effects by considering the impact of economic horizontal inequality. Again, we are up against what is commonly perceived as a nonresult. As was shown in Chapter 2, the contemporary quantitative literature on civil war finds no evidence for a link between economic inequality and internal conflict. Based on indicators measuring individual wealth distributions, these studies find no statistically distinguishable relationship to internal conflict (e.g., Fearon and Laitin 2003; Collier and Hoeffler 2004). Yet, inequality continues to occupy a prominent place in the qualitative literature on civil wars and has repeatedly been linked to conflict processes (Wood 2003; Sambanis 2005, p. 323; Boix 2008; Stewart 2008a). Earlier research relying on the Minorities at Risk data link found that economically discriminated groups were more likely to mobilize or protest (see, e.g., Gurr 1993a; Goldstone et al. 2010). However, this line of research has tended to look at measures of political instability broader than civil war. Their claims about groups have been largely ignored by much of the conventional civil war literature, which has focused on countries rather than groups. Moreover, in the last few years, some quantitative studies of civil war have started to appear arguing that the current literatures failure to connect distributional asymmetries to conflict behavior may actually be due to inappropriate conceptualization and imperfect measurements, rather than reflecting a fundamental absence of any causal effect (Ostby 2008b; see also Cramer 2006; Stewart 2008a).