INTRODUCTION

Although the number of violent conflicts and civil wars has been on the wane since the mid-1990s, there were still 29 ongoing intrastate violent conflicts around the world in 2009. The majority of conflicts consist of fighting between groups who are united by a common ethnic or religious identity. Moreover, over recent decades the identity basis of conflicts has become much more explicit, with the proportion of all conflicts that are labelled as ‘ethnic’ increasing from 15 per cent in 1953 to nearly 60 per cent by 2005. However, ethnic or religious differences in themselves do not cause violent conflict, as evidenced by the fact that the vast majority of multicultural societies are able to maintain peaceful inter-ethnic and religious relations. It is crucial, therefore, to look ‘beyond religion and ethnicity, as such, to find the causes of “ethnic” conflict’.

One important hypothesis about the causes of violent conflicts focuses on the presence of major ‘horizontal inequalities’ or inequalities between culturally defined groups. More precisely, this hypothesis ‘is based on the view that when cultural differences coincide with economic and political differences between groups, this can cause deep resentment that may lead to violent struggles.’ The concept of horizontal inequalities (HIs) and its theorised relationship with conflict was first developed by the Oxford-based development economist Frances Stewart in the context of a series of collaborative projects on the socio-economic causes and consequences of internal conflict and humanitarian emergencies and has subsequently been extensively researched by the Centre for Research on Inequality, Human Security and Ethnicity (CRISE) based at the University of Oxford. The main aim of this paper is to review the evidence concerning the relationship between horizontal inequalities and violent group mobilisation in multiethnic societies and to evaluate to what extent horizontal inequalities considerations are taken into account in countries coming out of conflict. The paper also discusses a range of measures and policies that could contribute to reducing horizontal inequalities in post-conflict settings.