When the Biggest Group Is Left Behind, Communal Violence Follows in Sub-Saharan Africa

📌 The Argument

Socioeconomic inequality can generate intergroup grievances that, in the context of an exclusionary state and elite incentives to mobilize groups competitively, help precipitate violent communal conflict. The analysis links these political mechanisms to measurable differences in welfare and education at the subnational level.

📍 How Regions and Inequality Were Mapped

• Constructed subnational inequality measures from a series of household surveys covering multiple countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.
• Calculated inequality in two dimensions: household welfare and education, distinguishing between
• vertical inequality (between individuals) and
• horizontal inequality (between ethnic groups).
• Combined these inequality measures with new georeferenced data on communal conflict across Sub-Saharan Africa for the period 1990–2008.

🔎 Key Findings

• Regions with strong socioeconomic inequalities—both vertical and horizontal—are significantly more exposed to violent communal conflicts.
• The risk is especially high in regions where the largest ethnic group is severely disadvantaged relative to other groups.
• The results hold when inequality is measured by both welfare and education, underscoring the importance of multiple socioeconomic dimensions.

⚠️ Why It Matters

The findings link distributional gaps to communal violence: unequal material and educational standing can create grievances that, combined with exclusionary state legitimacy and elite competition over communal mobilization, increase the likelihood of violence. This highlights the importance of addressing subnational inequalities and group disparities to reduce the risk of communal conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa.