Does Horizontal Education Inequality Lead to Violent Conflict?

Are countries where some ethnic or religious groups have systematically lower levels of education more likely to experience civil conflict than those where all groups have equal access to school? This is the central question in the growing literature investigating the relationship between horizontal inequalities (i.e., inequalities between ethnic, religious, and subnational groups) in education and violent conflict. EPDC's findings show that in most recent years, countries with higher levels of horizontal inequalities in terms of mean years of schooling have been substantially more likely to experience violent conflict. While the authors acknowledge that the causality of this relationship cannot be established, they offer plausible explanations for the findings, including the increasingly severe implications of educational exclusion on individuals’ life prospects, and suggest avenues for future research and data collection.