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.
