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This book argues that political and economic inequalities following group lines generate grievances that in turn can motivate civil war. Lars-Erik Cederman, Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, and Halvard Buhaug offer a theoretical approach that highlights ethnonationalism and how the relationship between group identities and inequalities are fundamental for successful mobilization to resort to violence. Although previous research highlighted grievances as a key motivation for political violence, contemporary research on civil war has largely dismissed grievances as irrelevant, emphasizing instead the role of opportunities. This book shows that the alleged non-results for grievances in previous research stemmed primarily from atheoretical measures, typically based on individual data. The authors develop new indicators of political and economic exclusion at the group level, and show that these exert strong effects on the risk of civil war. They provide new analyses of the effects of transnational ethnic links and the duration of civil wars, and extended case discussions illustrating causal mechanisms.
List of contents
1. Introduction; Part I. Theories and Concepts: 2. Inequality and grievances in the civil war literature; 3. From horizontal inequality to civil war via grievances; Part II. Analyzing the Outbreak of Civil War: 4. Political exclusion and civil war; 5. Economic inequality and civil war; 6. Transborder ethnic kin and civil war; 7. Country-level inequalities and civil war; Part III. Beyond Civil War Onset: 8. Political exclusion and the duration and outcomes of civil war; 9. Conclusions for theory and policy.
About the author
Lars-Erik Cederman is Professor of International Conflict Research at the Center for Comparative and International Studies at ETH Zürich. His research interests include conflict processes related to ethnicity, nationalism, democratization and state formation. He is the author of Emergent Actors in World Politics: How States and Nations Develop and Dissolve (1997), the editor of Constructing Europe's Identity: The External Dimension (2001) and co-editor of New Systems Theories of World Politics (with Mathias Albert and Alexander Wendt, 2010). He is the winner of the 2012 and 2002 American Political Science Association's Heinz I. Eulau Awards (in 2012 with Kristian Skrede Gleditsch and Nils B. Weidmann), the 2000 Furniss Award for Emergent Actors in World Politics, and the Horace H. Rackham Distinguished Dissertation Award from the University of Michigan.
Summary
This book argues that political and economic inequalities following group lines generate grievances that in turn can motivate civil war. The book's analyses show that systematic political and economic inequalities at the group level exert a strong effect on the risk of civil war, and the authors present examples illustrating motivating grievances.
Report
'The role of grievances in insurgency and civil war has had a roller coaster career since the 1970s. Once regarded as prime causes of these conflicts, grievances subsequently were shelved in favor of factors like resources, political opportunities, and state capacity. Inequality, Grievances, and Civil War makes a persuasive case that the literature has thrown the baby out with the bath water. Based on the methodologically sophisticated analysis of comprehensive new cross-national databases, Cederman and his associates reinstate the causal priority of shared grievances in explaining civil war - an achievement that has profound policy implications. A must-read for scholars of civil conflict.' Michael Hechter, Arizona State University and the University of Copenhagen
