Unequal We Fight: The Impact of Economic Inequality Within Ethnic Groups on Conflict Initiation

Rebel mobilization is a crucial component of conflict initiation, but the existing civil war literature has not given adequate attention to this element in an ethnic group’s decision to fight. In this paper we look at the mobilization process by considering the impact of intragroup economic inequality on conflict. We argue that an ethnic group’s economic inequality is negatively related to its mobilization costs and therefore increases the likelihood that the group initiates a conflict. Confronted by the collective action problem inherent to rebel recruitment, rebel leaders in highly unequal ethnic groups face lower costs in creating the necessary material and/or purposive incentives to overcome freeriding and form a potent rebel movement. To assess our claim empirically, we developed a new measure of intra-group economic inequality by combining high resolution satellite images of light emissions, spatial population data, and geocoded ethnic settlement areas. After validating our measure against alternative measures of economic inequality we include it in a statistical model of conflict initiation and find considerable for our theoretical prediction: greater economic inequality within a group significantly increases the risk of conflict, especially if the group is excluded from political power and above or below the country average in terms of per-capita income.