Re-examining Civil War: Ethnicity, Horizontal Inequality, and Space

Ma jor literature on conflict claims that ethnicity and inequality don’t matter in predicting civil war onset. This article uses spatial data to construct new variables for horizontal inequality and asserts that viewed through this lens, ethnicity matters. We forward the argument that exclusion from central forms of power and discrimination increase the likelihood of civil war, as does territorial share. To contribute to the growing literature on civil war onset, we leverage emerging Geographic Informations Systems (GIS) data to aggregate within country variation and construct a large-N dataset. Ultimately, we claim that using spatial and GIS data has the potential to combine the ‘thickness’ of small-N case studies with the inferential power of large-N cross-country analysis.