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Unequal We Fight: Between- and Within-Group Inequality andEthnic Civil War*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 April 2015

Patrick M. Kuhn  and
Nils B. Weidmann
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Abstract

When and why ethnic groups rebel remains a central puzzle in the civil warliterature. In this paper, we examine how different types of inequalitiesaffect both an ethnic group’s willingness and opportunity to fight. We arguethat political and economic inter-group inequalities motivate ethnic groupsto initiate a fight against the state, and that intra-group economicinequality lowers their elite’s costs of providing the necessary materialand/or purposive incentives to overcome collective action problems inherentto rebel recruitment. We therefore predict that internally unequal ethnicgroups excluded from power and/or significantly richer or poorer relative tothe country’s average are most likely to engage in a civil war. To assessour claim empirically, we develop a new global measure of economicinequality by combining high-resolution satellite images of light emissions,spatial population data, and geocoded ethnic settlement areas. Aftervalidating our measure at the country- and group level, we include it in astandard statistical model of civil war onset and find considerable supportfor our theoretical prediction: greater economic inequality within an ethnicgroup significantly increases the risk of conflict, especially if politicalor economic inequalities between groups provide a motive.

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Type
Original Articles
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 3 , Issue 3 , September 2015 , pp. 543 - 568
Copyright
© The European Political Science Association 2015 

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Footnotes

*

Patrick M. Kuhn, Lecturer in Comparative Politics, School ofGovernment and International Affairs (SGIA), Durham University,Durham, UK (nils.weidmann@uni-konstanz.de). Nils B. Weidmann,Professor of Political Science, Department of Politics and PublicAdministration, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany(nils.weidmann@uni-konstanz.de). Theauthors thank Danielle F. Jung, Jacob N. Shapiro, Thomas Scherer,Austin Wright, and seminar participants at the 3rd Annual Conferenceof the European Political Science Association, the PrincetonInternational Relations Faculty Colloquium, the Mannheim Center forEuropean Social Research, the Peace Research Institute Oslo, as wellas the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. This researchwas supported, in part, by AFOSR, grant # FA9550-09-1-0314 and by theAlexander von Humboldt Foundation (Sofja Kovalevskaja Award). A largepart of the writing was completed while the first author was aPostdoctoral Associate at the Woodrow Wilson School for Public andInternational Affairs at Princeton University. The data used in thisstudy are available via the PSRM DataVerse site. To view supplementarymaterial for this article, please visit http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2015.7

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