Conflict and Social Cohesion

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Location: Seminar Room G, Manor Road Building, Oxford

Date: 14 May 2019 13:00

Frances Stewart, University of Oxford

Arnim Langer, KU Leuven

A light sandwich lunch is served at 12.50pm. All are welcome.


Frances Stewart is emeritus professor of Development Economics, University of Oxford. She was Director of the Oxford Department of International Development (1993-2003) and the Centre for Research on Inequality, Human Security and Ethnicity (2003-2010). She has been an adviser to the UNDP’s Human Development Report since its inception in 1990. She was Chair of the United Nation’s Committee for Development Policy (2010-2012) and vice-chair of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) (2004-6). Her prime recent research interests are horizontal inequalities, conflict and human development. Among many publications, she is the leading author of Horizontal Inequalities and Conflict: Understanding Group Violence in Multiethnic Societies (2008) and Advancing Human Development: Theory and Practice ((2018).

The seminar will cover two major issues relating to horizontal inequalities:

  • The importance of perceptions of inequality as a source of action; and the relationship of perceptions of horizontal inequalities to ‘objective’ measures, including both socio-economic inequalities and political inequalities.
  • The relationship of horizontal inequalities and democracy. This will include a discussion of why and when one would expect such a relationship, in terms of both political and socio-economic inequalities, and some empirical evidence on the relationship.

Arnim Langer is Director of the Centre for Research on Peace and Development (CRPD), Chair Holder of the UNESCO Chair in Sustainable Peacebuilding and Associate Professor of International Politics at KU Leuven. He is also associate researcher at the Oxford Department of International Development (ODID), Research Associate at the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit (SALDRU) at the University of Cape Town (UCT) & Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. He has published extensively on issues of ethnicity, horizontal inequality and conflict in a range of absolute top journals, including Political Analysis, African Affairs, World Development, Foreign Affairs, Democratization, Social Science Computer Review and Social Indicators Research.