First and foremost I would like to thank my supervisor, Scott Gates, for constructive feedback, interesting discussions, and not least for showing his confidence in me and my project. I really appreciate Scott's combination of intelligence, deep insights, unpretentiousness, wit, and social skills. Anne Julie Semb, my second supervisor, also deserves warm thanks for academic advice as well as personal support. I am also particularly grateful to Nils Petter Gleditsch for his guidance and enthusiasm. Nils Petter has always provided feedback on various drafts of my papers around the clock, be it on weekday or vacation. As is the case with so many other of Nils Petter's former students, I would never have applied for a doctoral scholarship had it not been for his encouragement.
The case study literature is ripe with examples of a positive association between inequality and civil war, but systematic country-level studies have largely failed to find a significant relationship. One reason for this discrepancy may be that large-N studies tend to ignore spatial variations in group welfare within countries, although civil wars often take place within limited areas. We address this gap in the literature by applying GIS operations to Demographic and Health Surveys to construct new disaggregated data on welfare and socioeconomic inequalities between and within subnational regions in 22 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. These measures are coupled with geographical data on the location of conflict zones for the period 1986-2004. We find that conflict onsets are more likely in regions with (1) low levels of education; (2) strong relative deprivation regarding household assets; (3) strong intraregional inequalities; and (4) combined presence of natural resources and relative deprivation. Socioeconomic status has long been associated with engagement in violent conflict. Recent economic models of civil war focus on opportunity costs for rebel recruitment (e.g., Collier and Hoeffler 2004) whereas classical theories of relative 1 This article is part of the Polarization and Conflict Project
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.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.