Grievances and Civil Wars

Prominent early accounts of the determinants of civil war emphasize opportunity or insurgency feasibility. Such accounts also downplay the role of ‘grievance’ as a determinant of civil conflict. We trace the ways in which grievance is looked upon in the literature, from democratic institutions and horizontal income and wealth inequality to the exclusion of groups from political power. In contrast to the early literature’s argument that grievance is too ubiquitous to be analytically useful, more recent work demonstrates that both ethnic group political exclusion and ethnic group level economic inequities explain civil war onset. We further investigate the ways in which the presence of oil resources interacts with group-level political and economic inequities to increase or mitigate the risk of civil war.