Investigating the relationship between inequality and conflict

On the evening of the 7^th of July 2021, former President Jacob Zuma handed himself over to the police after being sentenced by the Constitutional Court of South Africa to 15 months imprisonment for failing to appear before the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of State Capture (the Zondo Commission). Two nights later, civil unrest broke out across KwaZulu-Natal and quickly spread to Gauteng. The unrest continued until the 17^th of July 2021; trucks were torched, shopping malls looted, and warehouses and factories destroyed. When the police's inability to contain the violence became apparent, 25,000 members of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) were deployed to restore calm.

In his address on the 16^th of July 2021, President Cyril Ramaphosa described the events as “nothing less than a deliberate, coordinated and well-planned attack on our democracy” and accused the (unnamed) instigators of having "sought to manipulate the poor and vulnerable for their own benefit". The Expert Panel appointed to review South Africa's preparedness and response to the unrest similarly noted that the violence and looting occurred amid high levels of unemployment and poverty, persistent inequality, poor spatial planning, and unsuitable living conditions for many.

The locations most affected during the unrest were largely the same areas that had experienced frequent community protests over service delivery, housing, and other safety and development issues in the preceding decade (see blue dots in Figure 1.1).^[1] While the scale of the looting and destruction in July 2021 could not have been anticipated, the vulnerability of these communities and their demonstrated capacity to mobilise suggest that the unrest, though partly spontaneous, was not wholly surprising.

The increase in community protests in recent years as well as the scale of July 2021 unrest prompted me to reflect on the concrete and measurable consequences of inequality, and, more specifically, on the relationship between inequality and the risk of conflict in the South African context. This became the subject of my PhD thesis.

Figure 1.1: Locations of the July 2021 unrest and community protests (2012-2019) in KwaZulu-Natal

Notes: This figure depicts the locations of protest and riot events in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) province in July 2021 (left) and community protests over the 2012-2019 period (right). The areas on the map are municipalities in KZN and are shaded according to the severity of the income Gini coefficient. Source: Authors’ illustration using data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project (Raleigh et al., 2010) and the 2011 South African Census Community Profiles (Statistics South Africa, 2014).

One of the most robust findings in the quantitative conflict literature is that high inequality significantly increases the risk of civil war, a form of armed conflict that involves the state. For South Africa, this raises an uncomfortable question: why, in one of the most unequal countries in the world, has there not been a civil war?^[2]

The pessimistic answer is that it is only a matter of time. An alternative answer is that inequality does not inevitably lead to war, and that by focusing on the most devastating conflicts, existing literature may be overlooking the smaller forms of contention that signal growing tensions long before they escalate. Studying these smaller, less deadly manifestations of conflict puts us in a better position to identify warning signs of instability and, more importantly, address the underlying social ills.

My PhD research tried to do exactly this. In one of my substantive chapters, I combined national protest data with census data to examine the relationship between local inequality and community protests in South Africa, and drew on theories of relative deprivation from sociology and political science to interpret the results. The key finding of this chapter is that protests against the government are more likely in areas where inequality is higher. While this finding may seem intuitive, my research is among the first to provide national-level quantitative evidence to support this intuition.

When I started my PhD, I was apprehensive about working in this area. Having done no courses on conflict or social movements at UCT, I felt ill-equipped to undertake research that spanned economics, political science, and sociology. My supervisors, Professors Martin Wittenberg and Justine Burns, were very encouraging, however, and gave me the freedom and support I needed to work on something that genuinely interested me, even though it required working across disciplines.

The PhD journey was a difficult one that began with much support from my supervisors and ended without the support it began with. Martin passed away in July 2024; Justine earlier this year. Both of them battled cancer, and working around their chemotherapy was exhausting for them and hard for me. But both remained committed to teaching, training, and mentoring their students until the very end. I am inspired by their commitment and am glad to have had the privilege of working with them, if only for a few years.

As a Postdoctoral Research Fellow within the African Centre of Excellence for Inequality Research (ACEIR) at SALDRU, I intend to continue working on the themes of inequality and conflict, with the aim of contributing to a deeper understanding of the causes of conflict and the conditions that promote peace and social stability.