Does inequality cause conflict?

Abstract This paper suggests that economic inequality is important to explaining civil conflict, but that the links are not as direct as is often supposed. It is important to focus on the variety of ways in which inequalities are managed by societies, and the significance of varying kinds of inequality. It is also important to understand the transmission mechanisms that enable a relatively peaceable durable inequality to turn into a violent conflict. These considerations, together with the poor quality of the available inequality data, should make us more cautious about the conclusions reached by cross‐country empirical studies into the causes of conflict which ascribe a strong predictive power to measures of inequality. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.