Fragmentation or inequality: Ethnic divisions and conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper examines the relationship between local ethnic divisions and conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa. Using census subsamples and large-scale household surveys, we construct a new subnational dataset on ethnic inequality capturing group-level differences in education, asset ownership, and access to basic amenities for several hundred regions in thirty-five countries. To distinguish between deep-rooted and more recent ethnic divisions, we incorporate groups from our sample into Ethnologue’s linguistic tree model and generate alternative measures of both ethnic fractionalization and inequality based on ancestral languages. Our analysis, leveraging within-country variation and accounting for numerous regional characteristics, reveals a robust positive relationship between ethnic fractionalization and conflict, especially when using deeper linguistic cleavages to define distinct groups. In contrast, ethnic inequality shows no systematic association with conflict frequency or severity. These findings suggest the primacy of ethnolinguistic differences per se, rather than socioeconomic disparities between groups, as a driver of local conflict.