Square Pegs in Round Holes: Inequalities, Grievances, and Civil War.

Much of the recent literature on civil war treats explanations rooted in political and economic grievances with considerable suspicion, and many empirical studies conclude that there is no relationship between ethnic diversity or measures of inequality and political violence to support such claims. We argue that common indicators used in previous research, such as the ethno-linguistic fractionalization (ELF) and the Gini coefficient for income dispersion, fail to capture fundamental aspects of political exclusion and economic inequality that can motivate conflict. In this paper we develop new country-level indices that directly reflect inequalities among groups, including political discrimination and wealth differentials along ethnic lines. Our results show that these theoretically informed country profiles are much better predictors of civil war onset than conventional indicators, even when we control for a number of alternative factors potentially related to grievances or opportunities for conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]