Violent Conflicts: When Tensions Escalate to Violence

When disagreements stop being arguments and start producing casualties, we have crossed into the territory of violent conflict. This is the point where parties abandon negotiation, persuasion, and compromise in favour of force. Understanding how a dispute reaches this stage, and why some conflicts turn deadly while others stay peaceful, is one of the central concerns of peace and conflict studies. This post breaks down what violent conflict actually is, what drives it, and how it tends to escalate.

What is a violent conflict?
The work of Johan Galtung
The three forms of violence
Direct violence
Structural violence
Cultural violence
Why do conflicts turn violent?
The greed versus grievance debate
Resource scarcity and competition
Power struggles and the security dilemma
The dynamics of escalation
The stages of conflict
The conflict spiral
Why this understanding matters

What is a violent conflict?

A violent conflict occurs when parties move beyond peaceful means and use physical force to dominate, damage, or destroy the other side’s ability to pursue its interests. The defining features are physical force, destruction of property, and human casualties. This separates violent conflict from ordinary disputes, where parties still argue, bargain, or seek compromise within accepted rules.

The field of peace studies treats conflict itself as a normal and even unavoidable part of human society. Scholars recognise that conflict is inherent in human behaviour because people and groups will always have different needs, values, and interests. The problem is not the existence of conflict but its turn towards violence. A core goal of the discipline is to develop better ways of resolving disputes without violent conflict and to transform the conditions that lead to war.

The work of Johan Galtung

Much of how we think about violence today comes from the Norwegian scholar Johan Galtung, often called the father of peace studies. He observed that every conflict contains an inner contradiction, either because two actors pursue the same scarce goal or because one actor is caught between two incompatible goals. The energy released by this contradiction can flow in two directions: towards violent destruction or towards constructive, peaceful outcomes. Violent conflict is what happens when that energy turns destructive.

The three forms of violence

One of Galtung’s most useful contributions is his idea that violence is not only the physical kind we see on the news. He developed a typology, often called the violence triangle, which identifies three connected forms of violence. Understanding all three helps explain why violent conflict erupts and why it is so hard to end.

Direct violence

Direct violence is the visible form. It includes behaviours that threaten life or reduce a person’s ability to meet basic needs, such as killing, maiming, bullying, and assault. This is the violence people usually picture when they hear the word: physical, immediate, and obvious. It is the tip of the triangle.

Structural violence

Structural violence is less visible but often more damaging over time. It refers to the systematic ways in which some groups are blocked from equal access to opportunities, goods, and services needed to meet basic human needs. This can be built into formal legal structures, such as apartheid in South Africa, or it can exist without any legal mandate, such as unequal access to education or healthcare for marginalised communities. No single attacker pulls a trigger, yet people suffer and die because of how society is arranged.

Cultural violence

Cultural violence is the most subtle layer. Galtung defined it as any aspect of a culture that can be used to legitimise violence in its direct or structural form. Symbolic violence built into a culture does not kill or maim by itself, but it makes the other two forms look or feel acceptable. Ideologies of racial superiority, religious justifications for domination, and narratives that dehumanise an enemy all fall into this category. Cultural violence is what makes direct and structural violence appear natural, inevitable, or even right.

These three forms feed each other. Cultural violence justifies structural violence, structural violence breeds grievance, and grievance can erupt into direct violence. Galtung argued this triangle contains built-in vicious cycles, which is why isolated violent incidents are often symptoms of deeper structural and cultural roots rather than one-off events.

Why do conflicts turn violent?

If conflict is normal, why do only some conflicts become violent? Researchers have offered several overlapping explanations. The most widely debated framework is the greed versus grievance debate.

The greed versus grievance debate

The phrase “greed versus grievance” refers to two baseline arguments about what causes civil wars and armed conflict. The greed argument holds that combatants are motivated by the desire to improve their own situation, often through control of valuable resources or by gaining power. The grievance argument holds that people rebel over issues of identity, such as ethnicity, religion, or social class, and over relative deprivation rather than over economics alone.

Both arguments have evidence behind them, but neither works perfectly on its own. A major study by Murshed and Tadjoeddin argues that neither greed nor grievance alone is sufficient for violent conflict to break out. What actually unlocks violence, they argue, is institutional breakdown, which they describe as the failure of the social contract. When the rules that normally govern how a society shares its resources and settles disputes collapse, grievances can be transformed into organised, collective violence. In practice, most scholars now see greed and grievance as complementary rather than competing explanations.

Resource scarcity and competition

Competition over scarce resources is one of the most reliable drivers of violent conflict. The economic theory of conflict holds that competition for resources such as land, water, energy, or wealth can create deep divisions between groups. When resources are limited and unevenly distributed, the stakes of losing rise sharply, and force can start to look like a rational option.

Natural resources play a complicated role. Certain commodities, such as oil, are tied to a higher likelihood of conflict breaking out, while others, such as diamonds, are linked to longer conflict duration. The reason is that resource wealth can lower the startup cost of war and give rebel groups a way to fund their fight. The political economist David Keen pointed out that war is not always about winning. For some powerful actors, prolonging a conflict can be profitable, especially in states with weak rule of law where violence becomes privatised and elites use force to capture private profit.

Power struggles and the security dilemma

Beyond resources, conflicts frequently turn on raw power, who holds it, who wants it, and who fears losing it. A key concept here is the security dilemma, sometimes called the spiral model. It describes a situation where one party increases its own security, for example by building up military strength, and other parties read this as a threat. They respond by arming themselves, which makes the first party feel less secure, and the cycle continues. The tragedy is that this can produce escalation and conflict that no party actually wanted.

This dynamic is not limited to wars between states. The security dilemma helps explain the relational logic at the heart of many internal conflicts as well, where mutual fear and uncertainty between communities drive an escalating, self-perpetuating cycle of insecurity.

The dynamics of escalation

Violent conflict rarely appears out of nowhere. It usually builds through stages. Understanding this progression is essential for anyone hoping to intervene before force takes over.

The stages of conflict

A common model identifies a sequence of stages: latent conflict, confrontation, crisis, outcome, and post-crisis. In the latent stage, the potential for conflict exists because groups have incompatible needs, but it has not yet surfaced. A triggering event then brings the conflict into the open. From there it may move quickly to settlement, or it may escalate into crisis, the stage where direct violence is most intense.

Importantly, conflicts do not follow this path in a neat straight line. They often jump back and forth, because unresolved issues lead to fresh confrontations. Protracted conflicts in particular resist any tidy linear model, and nearby communities can find themselves in different stages at the same time.

The conflict spiral

Once escalation begins, it tends to gather momentum. According to the conflict-spiral model, escalation results from a vicious circle of action and reaction, where each response is more severe than the action before it. Spirals can be retaliatory, driven by blame and a desire to punish, or defensive, driven by fear and the urge to protect oneself. Either way, each round adds new grievances, lengthens the list of complaints on both sides, and deepens the sense of crisis. As the spiral rises, the methods of fighting drift further and further from the original issue, and the relationship between the parties is fundamentally transformed.

This is why violent conflicts are so difficult to stop once they have begun. The longer they continue, the more the parties accumulate fresh reasons to keep fighting, and the harder it becomes to imagine any solution that includes the other side.

Why this understanding matters

Treating violent conflict as a single event misses the point. It is the visible peak of a deeper structure, fed by scarce resources, contested power, broken institutions, and cultural narratives that make force seem acceptable. Effective conflict management and resolution depends on reading these underlying conditions, not just reacting to the violence on the surface. Addressing each violent incident in isolation, while leaving the structural and cultural roots untouched, rarely produces lasting peace.

This is why peace studies distinguishes between negative peace, the mere absence of direct violence, and positive peace, the presence of justice, equality, and the conditions that remove the causes of violence in the first place. Stopping the shooting is necessary, but it is only the beginning of real conflict resolution.

What do you think? If grievance and greed both feed violent conflict, which root cause do you think is harder for a society to address, and why? And can a peace that simply stops the violence ever last if the structural and cultural conditions behind it remain unchanged?

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References

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Table of Contents

What is a violent conflict? 🔗

The work of Johan Galtung 🔗

The three forms of violence 🔗

Direct violence 🔗

Structural violence 🔗

Cultural violence 🔗

Why do conflicts turn violent? 🔗

The greed versus grievance debate 🔗

Resource scarcity and competition 🔗

Power struggles and the security dilemma 🔗

The dynamics of escalation 🔗

The stages of conflict 🔗

The conflict spiral 🔗

Why this understanding matters 🔗