The Perfect Storm: Relative Deprivation, Resource Mobilization and Collective Violence

Most quantitative studies of group conflict have emphasized the role of either motivational factors that foster grievances or the importance of mobilization capacity and opportunity for rebellion. While these approaches have often been regarded as alternative accounts, there is a need for conceptual and empirical models that focus on the relationship between the demand and supply side determinants of group conflict. This article proposes a theory of collective violence in which demand and supply are mutually reinforcing, and provides new group-level measures to test the theory. The results indicate that the rivalry between these explanations is misplaced: variation in collective violence is a product of their interaction—relative deprivation predicts more engagement in collective violence as a group’s relative mobilization capacity increases. Similarly, the effect of mobilization capacity is contingent on a group’s level of relative deprivation. Using new global data covering 186 groups in 93 countries, this article provides the first large-N investigation with group-level measures of these concepts and their hypothesized interaction. The findings from a structural equation model provide strong empirical support for the proposed conjectures.