doi:10.1017/S0003055411000207 Horizontal Inequalities and Ethnonationalist Civil War: A Global Comparison

Contemporary research on civil war has largely dismissed the role of political and economicgrievances, focusing instead on opportunities for conflict. However, these strong claims rest onquestionable theoretical and empirical grounds. Whereas scholars have examined primarily the relationship between individual inequality and conflict, we argue that horizontal inequalities between politically relevant ethnic groups and states at large can promote ethnonationalist conflict. Extending the empirical scope to the entire world, this article introduces a new spatial method that combines our newly geocoded data on ethnic groups ’ settlement areas with spatial wealth estimates. Based on these methodological advances, we find that, in highly unequal societies, both rich and poor groups fight more often than those groups whose wealth lies closer to the country average. Our results remain robust to a number of alternative sample definitions and specifications. A lthough logistical and power-relatedconditions—such as low state-level per capitaincome, weak state institutions, and peripheral and inaccessible territory—enjoy near-consensus sup-port as explanations of civil war onset, most of the contemporary literature regards explanations rooted in political and economic grievances with suspicion (Blattman and Miguel 2010). In fact, the debate over the status of grievances in such explanations date