Social Conflict

This chapter summarizes research on the relationship between inequality and conflict over the past three decades. The end of the Cold War marked a caesura in theorizing and studying conflict and inequality. Three major themes are discussed in this chapter. First, in the decade spanning from 1990 to 2000, an early strand of research treated group-based, religious, and ethnic inequalities as drivers of conflict, eventually leading to current debates on horizontal inequalities and relative deprivation. Second, a strand developed as a counter-theory to group-based approaches during the early 2000s and emphasized greed as a motive for civil war and conflict over grievances. This approach was later applied to the idea of new wars in the Global South. Here, authors claiming a qualitative change in warfare pointed to greed and tribalistic identity politics as sources of war in the Global South – and threats against which the Global North should protect itself. Third, the last strand of scholarship discussed has changed the focus from large N datasets to more fine-grained disaggregated data collected – among others – from surveys and interviews. This micropolitical turn took off after 2006 and analyses variances in violent practices, pointing to the reproduction and changes in social structures during times of war and beyond.