🔎 Two-stage framing that splits disagreement from violence

Conventional civil conflict research typically treats all non-violent cases as "at peace." This study separates the process into two distinct stages: first, the presence or absence of contested incompatibilities (conflict origination), and second, whether those incompatibilities escalate into armed violence (militarization). That distinction enables separate analysis of the causes of grievance formation and the causes of violent escalation.

📊 How existing studies were reworked and what data were used

• New, harmonized data on contested incompatibilities and on armed conflict underpin the analysis.
• Three prior studies of violent civil conflict were replicated and extended by reformulating their questions as a two-stage process.
• Multiple estimation procedures were compared and potential selection problems were explicitly considered to test whether findings change when separating origination from militarization.

📌 Key findings

• Group-based horizontal political inequalities (the kind emphasized in much research on violent civil conflict) are clearly associated with conflict origination (the onset of contested incompatibilities).
• Those same horizontal inequalities show no clear association with militarization (the onset of armed violence) once incompatibilities are present.
• Other factors commonly linked to civil war risk—most notably refugee flows and indicators of weak or "soft" state power—predict militarization but do not predict the initial onset of incompatibilities.
• Recasting civil conflict as a two-stage process reveals that different explanatory variables operate at different stages rather than uniformly increasing overall ‘‘conflict’’ risk.

💡 Why this matters for theory, methods, and data

• The two-stage approach clarifies competing mechanisms by showing whether a variable affects grievance formation, the shift to violence, or both.
• This framing helps assess alternative causal pathways and avoids conflating origins of contention with escalation into armed conflict.
• Results motivate targeted data-collection efforts to measure contested incompatibilities separately from militarization and encourage use of estimation strategies that account for selection between stages.