ABSTRACT
Violent conflicts (or civil wars) continue to wreak havoc in a range of countries around the world. They represent a major source of persistent underdevelopment and those concerned with promoting development must therefore give urgent priority to conflict prevention. Scholars from different disciplines have focused on different factors in order to explain the emergence of these conflicts, such as the role of ethnicity, the individual gain from civil war, relative deprivation explanations and the role of ethnic elites (Brown and Langer 2010). The different conflict narratives and explanations that are associated with these factors are usually complementary and overlap in important ways.
