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Horizontal Inequalities and Ethnonationalist Civil War: A Global Comparison

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2011

LARS-ERIK CEDERMAN ,
NILS B. WEIDMANN  and
KRISTIAN SKREDE GLEDITSCH
LARS-ERIK CEDERMAN*
Affiliation:
ETH Zürich
NILS B. WEIDMANN*
Affiliation:
Yale University
KRISTIAN SKREDE GLEDITSCH*
Affiliation:
University of Essex
*
Lars-Erik Cederman is Professor, Center for Comparative and International Studies, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zürich, IFW D 49.2, 8092 Zürich, Switzerland (lcederman@ethz.ch).
Nils B. Weidmann is Postdoctoral Fellow, Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, Yale University, P.O. Box 208206, New Haven, CT 06520 (nils.weidmann@yale.edu).
Kristian Skrede Gleditsch is Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, Essex, UKCO4 3SQ (ksg@essex.ac.uk).
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Abstract

Contemporary research on civil war has largely dismissed the role of political and economic grievances, focusing instead on opportunities for conflict. However, these strong claims rest on questionable theoretical and empirical grounds. Whereas scholars have examined primarily the relationship between individual inequality and conflict, we argue that horizontal inequalities between politically relevant ethnic groups and states at large can promote ethnonationalist conflict. Extending the empirical scope to the entire world, this article introduces a new spatial method that combines our newly geocoded data on ethnic groups’ settlement areas with spatial wealth estimates. Based on these methodological advances, we find that, in highly unequal societies, both rich and poor groups fight more often than those groups whose wealth lies closer to the country average. Our results remain robust to a number of alternative sample definitions and specifications.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 105 , Issue 3 , August 2011 , pp. 478 - 495
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2011

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