Grievances, Latent Anger and Unrest in Africa

ABSTRACT The conflict literature identifies various types of grievance, greed, aggravating and mitigating factors that contribute to unrest. Drawing on such literature, we conceptualize “latent anger” as an aggregate or conduit measure of these factors and as a precursor to various forms of unrest. Using the multiple indicator–multiple cause model, the relationships between various socioeconomic factors and latent anger and between latent anger and several forms of unrest are estimated based on 1998–2015 country-level panel data on unrest in Africa. Empirical findings show the contributions of unemployment, infant mortality, urbanization, democracy, and government instability in fomenting “latent anger” and its differential impacts on domestic and transnational terrorism, battles, riots, and other forms of unrest. This approach also yielded country indices of the variable “latent anger” that reveal country vulnerabilities to unrest and may be used as an early warning indicator.