Are civil conflicts driven by resource crises? Research suggests that the root of conflict, in part, is explained when analyzing how economic deprivation drives groups into turmoil. Resource ownership, especially when unevenly distributed, often leads to violence. Research remains divided, however, on which resources drive violence, and the precise mechanisms that are involved. While many scholars argue that inequality drives violence, there exist many other factors that can help to explain civil wars. Evidence in this chapter suggests that while oil dependence may trigger conflicts, the duration of conflict is heavily influenced by factors beyond resources alone. Contrarily, agricultural commodities lack significant ties to civil war onset or duration, challenging our understanding of deprivation on a country-specific basis. Conflict is inextricably tied to maintaining political order, which for resource-rich countries hinges on interacting factors that governance structures facilitate. Further analysis on these topics – like the greed, state capacity, and grievance frameworks – offers strong insights into why violence emerges, giving multiple avenues and case studies as evidence for explaining civil wars overall.

This chapter explores the changing nature of property rights over more than five decades in China through a case study of an individual family. Tracing the Zhu family’s demand for justice in the post-Mao era for the six houses it had owned and lost – the first five to Mao’s 1950s socialist reforms and the last one to post-Mao urbanization – the chapter notes how the post-Mao transition initially brought a small measure of justice when the family was allowed to reclaim their house and offered a token payment for their prior losses. This was undone in the rapid urbanization that led to the eviction of the family and the destruction of their home in 2005 to make way for a twenty-four-storey grand hotel that now stands in its place. The case demonstrates how the concept of transitional justice and limited past success in regaining property continue to motivate the family to engage in an ongoing struggle for justice.

This chapter examines the causes, prosecution, outcomes, and consequences of civil wars. It defines the concept of civil war, distinguishes between nationalist and secessionist civil wars, and presents several factors thought to drive civil war onset, including grievance, relative deprivation, identity, lootable resources, and state capacity. It then examines factors that might affect the likelihood of ending civil wars once started, including whether the issues under dispute are seen to be indivisible and the severity of commitment problems. It describes the consequences when rebel groups fighting a civil war are fragmented, and relatedly when there are several actors fighting in a civil war. The chapter then lays out possible solutions for ending civil wars and creating lasting peace, including third-party guarantors, power-sharing, and creating integrated police and security forces. It then discusses some of the devastating human consequences of civil wars The chapter applies many of the concepts in the chapter to a quantitative study on whether peacekeepers help prevent civil wars from recurring, and a case study of the Syrian Civil War.

The definition of labor rights for Korean workers has changed since the 1980s along with the neoliberal transformation of the economy. While workers demanded humane treatment and the right to form autonomous labor unions in the earlier period, labor rights in present day Korea are anchored on workers’ status recognition and the right to secure employment. Also, the methods through which workers press for their rights have shifted from union-based collective action to symbolic and extreme forms of protest. This chapter examines the changing notion of labor rights by investigating how structural conditions in the labor market generate workers’ primary grievances, how these grievances enlighten workers’ rights consciousness, and how workers’ interactions with employers and state institutions, including via labor laws, shaped the core claims of labor rights in the 1980s and the 2000s, respectively. It also compares the forms of collective action that workers take to assert their rights in these two periods.

One of the benefits of focusing on grievances in explaining protest and rebellion is that it draws attention to the importance of the quality of governance. If grievances are omnipresent and organization and opportunity are really all that count, then there can be few policy implications. If grievances are ubiquitous, the case is weak for institutional reforms that might make governance more responsive or alleviate deprivation. Rulers might well conclude that repression is their only means of averting rebellion. In reality, however, grievances sometimes inspire rebellions and good governance helps to forestall them.

Chapter Two examines the psychology of anger, its expected effects on behavior, and the prevalence of anger in political messaging. Drawing on different traditions in social psychology, this chapter breaks down the distinct attitudes underlying the emotion of anger, and I provide a theoretical account of why the emotional sentiment of resignation cultivated among African Americans inhibits the emergence of anger as this group surveys the political environment. I investigate a range of campaign messages and speeches from political elites over the years to highlight the why’s and how’s behind elites’ attempts to activate various emotions within the intended public—specifically anger. I conduct emotion discourse analyses of these messages in order to identify the emotional sentiments that are cultivated and reinforced within primarily white and black audiences. The chapter begins the exploration of the racial divide in the activation of political anger by surveying trends from the open-ended findings from the original survey experiment titled the 2018 Race, Anger and Participation (RAP) Study.