Abstract
This article examines the link between subnational poverty and the location of civil war events. Drawing on the ACLED dataset, which breaks internal conflicts down to individual events at the local level, we take a disaggregated approach to the study of conflict. Local-level socioeconomic data are taken from the Liberian Demographic and Health Survey. With geographical cells of approximately 76 km 2 as units of analysis, we test how absolute and relative welfare affect the presence and number of conflict events during the 1989-2002 Liberian civil war. We control for neighboring conflict events, distance to Monrovia and national borders, population density, diamond deposits, and ethnic affiliations. War events were more frequent in the richer locations. This may provide better support for “opportunity” explanations than for “relative deprivation” theories of conflict, but we argue that the relative weakness of the Liberian government makes it difficult to distinguish between the two.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
