Inequality, Ethnicity and Civil Conflict

We explore the connection between inequality and civil conflict by focusing on the mediating role of ethnic identity. Using over 200 individual-level surveys from 89 countries, we provide a new data set with countryand group-level measures of inequality within and across ethnic groups. We then show that consistent with Esteban and Ray’s (2011) argument about the need for labor and capital to fight civil wars, there is a strong positive association between the level of inequality within a group and the group’s propensity to engage in civil conflict. In addition, we find that countries with higher levels of inequality within ethnic groups are most likely to experience civil wars. By contrast, inequality across ethnic groups is not associated with the civil conflict. By breaking down measures of inequality into group-level components, the analysis also reveals why it is difficult to identify a relationship between general inequality and conflict, and it highlights more generally why it will often be difficult to draw substantive conclusions in cross-national research by relying on measures of overall inequality like the Gini.