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This paper suggests that economic inequality is important to explaining civil conflict, but that the links are not as direct as is often supposed. It is important to focus on the variety of ways in which inequalities are managed by societies, and the significance of varying kinds of inequality. It is also important to understand the transmission mechanisms that enable a relatively peaceable durable inequality to turn into a violent conflict. These considerations, together with the poor quality of the available inequality data, should make us more cautious about the conclusions reached by cross-country empirical studies into the causes of conflict which ascribe a strong predictive power to measures of inequality. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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This article investigates the challenges currently facing Afghanistan. It argues that 'post-conflict' peace and reconstruction in Afghanistan may depend on a dramatic expansion of institutionalized economic interdependence: this will not necessarily require obeisance to standard international policy paradigms and it will have to draw on existing patterns of interdependence, even though many of these are rooted in brutally exploitative war economy conditions. The authors argue further that neither peace nor economic development will hold without a centralized, credible and effective state, that the emergence of such a state is a political problem more than a technical problem, and that it will depend on a monopolization of force by the state. Such developments cannot be envisaged without policy being based on a close reading of the long and decidedly non-linear, conflictual experiences in state formation and failure in Afghanistan, a history whose patterns and implications are summarized in this article.