Horizontal Inequalities, Ethnic Politics and Violent Conflict: The Contrasting Experiences of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire

Abstract

Although the number of violent conflicts and civil wars has been on the wane since the mid-1990s, today there are still around 30 ongoing violent intra-state conflicts around the world. The majority of these consist of fighting between groups who are united by a common ethnic or religious identity. Since 1945, the identity basis of conflicts has become increasingly 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 (Stewart and Brown, 2007). In the 1990s, politicians, journalists and intellectuals propagated the popular view that the breakdown of multiethnic societies and the emergence of ethnic conflicts, in both Africa and Eastern Europe, was due to the ‘eruption of ancient and irrational tribal antagonisms’ (Turton, 1997: 80). Since then, and despite the fact that a substantial amount of research has shown the fallibility of these claims, these views remain prominent in non-scholarly circles of society.