Horizontal Inequalities and Violent Conflict: Conceptual adn Empirical Linkages

Violent conflicts (or civil wars) continue to wreak havoc in a range of countries around the world. They represent a major source of persistent underdevelopment and those concerned with promoting development must therefore give urgent priority to conflict prevention. Scholars from different disciplines have focused on different factors in order to explain the emergence of these conflicts, such as the role of ethnicity, the individual gain from civil war, relative deprivation explanations and the role of ethnic elites (Brown and Langer, 2010). The different conflict narratives and explanations that are associated with these factors are usually complementary and overlap in important ways. In this working paper we focus on the role of horizontal inequalities (HI), or inequalities between culturally defined identity groups, in provoking violent conflicts, including national level civil wars and smaller regional conflicts. They are termed ‘horizontal’ to differentiate them from ‘vertical’ inequalities which relate to the distribution among individuals. HIs are multifaceted, including socio-economic, political and cultural recognition dimensions. Moreover, it is not only a matter of measurable (or ‘objective’) inequalities, but also perceptions of inequalities, since people act as a result of perceptions rather than some possibly unknown facts. In this paper we will discuss in great detail how to define HIs; how to measure them and we will also provide an overview of the evidence linking HIs to the emergence of violent conflicts. We will also present some policy options for correcting HIs and identify some important avenues for future research.