Social tensions impede social cohesion and public goods provision. They can also be a driving force for more serious conflicts such as civil wars. Surprisingly, however, the emergence of social tensions has only rarely been studied in the literature. In the present contribution a game-theoretic...

A multiethnic country like Côte d’Ivoire, which was relatively stable until the late 1980s, has been mired in crisis in the last two decades and experienced large-scale violence. This paper undertakes a disaggregated analysis of the civil war at sub-national levels in Cote d’Ivoire for the...

This paper addresses the endogeneity of ethnic settlement patterns and conflict, that is, how settlement patterns affect conflict, and how conflict in turn changes the ethnic map. I argue that the application of violence during conflict is driven by the territorial aspirations of ethnic groups....