Suchergebnisse

By the mid-century, two-thirds of the world population will reside in urban areas. The bulk of this urban growth will take place in developing countries. Whereas average living standards are usually higher in urban areas, economic growth does not result in prosperity for all. Inequality is a likely source of frustration that could increase the potential for political radicalization and unrest—especially if certain groups suffer from systematic social exclusion. Drawing on household surveys, the article provides new indicators of internal migration, poverty and inequality for 34 cities in Africa and Asia for the period 1986–2006. These data are linked with data on urban social disorder events. The results suggest that it is not the actual movement of rural people into the cities that creates social upheaval. Rather, overall poor and unequal educational opportunities as well as socioeconomic marginalization of rural–urban migrants are found to spur increased levels of urban violence.

Does economic inequality breed political violence? For almost half a century, scholars have tried to test this assumption, finding little empirical support for a statistical relationship between the two variables. This article provides a critical review of this literature, starting out with the link between so-called vertical (inter-individual) inequality and conflict. I argue that the lack of empirical results can largely be attributed to the almost exclusive focus on individual-level differences in terms of income or land. Group identity is critical to recruitment and maintaining allegiance to a military organization. Hence, we should focus the attention on the relevant form of inequality—that between groups, or so-called horizontal inequalities. In contrast to the studies focusing on vertical inequality, an emerging quantitative literature on horizontal inequalities and conflict has found a positive link, which is more in line with the evidence from several case studies. However, measuring horizontal inequalities is a clear challenge, and there is a need for additional studies to qualify the initial findings. I conclude by suggesting some avenues for future research.

Recent large-N studies of civil war conclude that inequality does not increase the risk of violent conflict. This article argues that such conclusions may be premature because these studies, which usually test the conflict potential of `vertical inequality' (i.e. income inequality between individuals), tend to neglect the group aspect of inequality. Case studies suggest that what matters for conflict is a concept closely linked to both economic and ethnic polarization: `horizontal inequalities', or inequalities that coincide with identity-based cleavages. Horizontal inequalities may enhance both grievances and group cohesion among the relatively deprived and thus facilitate mobilization for conflict. This article provides a quantitative test of this argument, exploring whether various forms of polarization and horizontal inequalities affect the probability of civil conflict onset across 36 developing countries in the period 1986—2004. National household data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) are used to construct measures of ethnic, social and economic polarization, as well as vertical and horizontal inequalities along two dimensions: social and economic. The article also introduces a combined measure of ethnic/socio-economic polarization as an alternative to the horizontal inequality measure. Robust results from panel and cross-section analyses show that social polarization and horizontal social inequality are positively related to conflict outbreak. Variables for purely ethnic polarization, inter-individual inequalities and combined ethnic/socio-economic polarization are not significant.

This article examines the role of economic inequality in influencing the risk of armed conflict between communal groups in Sub-Saharan Africa. We argue that socioeconomic inequality can generate intergroup grievances, which, due to the exclusionary legitimacy of the African state and elite incentives to engage in competitive mobilization of communal groups, precipitate violent communal conflict. To examine this argument, we rely on a series of household surveys to construct subnational inequality measures. For each region, we calculate measures of inequality in terms of household welfare and education between individuals (vertical inequality) and between ethnic groups (horizontal inequality). Combining the inequality data with new georeferenced data on communal conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa for the period 1990-2008, we find that regions with strong socioeconomic inequalities-both vertical and horizontal-are significantly more exposed to violent communal conflicts. More specifically, regions in which the largest ethnic group is severely disadvantaged compared to other groups are particularly prone to experience communal conflict.(International Interactions (London)/ FUB)

AbstractThe civil war in Burundi (1993–2005) led to the forced displacement of a large part of the population. This study aims to explore how that displacement affected fertility behavior. Using a nationally representative, retrospective survey on birth and residential histories of 4,523 Burundian women, we examine the impact of conflict‐induced displacement on fertility. These unique data enable us to distinguish between remaining‐in‐place, voluntary migration, and forced displacement, as well as to distinguish between periods spent "on the move" versus periods spent in residence in the new site. Adopting a semiparametric regression model, we analyze both the probability of the first pregnancy and the subsequent spacing of higher order pregnancies. We find that the risk of a first pregnancy was higher in the year in which a woman was forcibly displaced and lower in the year a woman migrated voluntarily. Residency in a new site increased the risk of pregnancy for both.

This article examines the link between subnational poverty and the location of civil war events. Drawing on the ACLED dataset, which breaks internal conflicts down to individual events at the local level, we take a disaggregated approach to the study of conflict. Local-level socioeconomic data are taken from the Liberian Demographic and Health Survey. With geographical cells of approximately 76 km 2 as units of analysis, we test how absolute and relative welfare affect the presence and number of conflict events during the 1989-2002 Liberian civil war. We control for neighboring conflict events, distance to Monrovia and national borders, population density, diamond deposits, and ethnic affiliations. War events were more frequent in the richer locations. This may provide better support for "opportunity" explanations than for "relative deprivation" theories of conflict, but we argue that the relative weakness of the Liberian government makes it difficult to distinguish between the two.