Why Conflicts Escalate

While many conflicts remain limited in scope, others escalate quickly, becoming highly lethal, protracted, and destabilising. Understanding why some wars escalate, while others do not, is essential for designing early interventions and effective peacebuilding strategies. 

In this year’s Global Peace Index, we identified nine key factors that influence the pace and intensity of conflict escalation. These are not simply causes of conflict, but mechanisms that make violence more destructive, enduring, and resistant to resolution. Together, they help explain how certain conditions enable a conflict to move from a political dispute to full-scale war.  

Identified using an AI-powered approach involving text annotations coded by a large language model, these nine factors point to the importance of the geography, resources, and motivations in violence rising to extreme levels.

The nine conflict escalation factors:

1. 1. Urban origin onset: When violence erupts in urban centres, particularly capital cities, it poses a direct threat to the state’s authority and often provokes an immediate, large-scale response. Urban density also magnifies the human cost and disrupts civilian life, making the conflict harder to contain. 
2. 2. Accessible terrain: Accessible geography facilitates rapid military advances and wider offensives, whereas remote or difficult landscapes may limit movement but prolong warfare through attrition.
3. 3. High logistical supply: Logistical capacity is another essential element. Sustaining conflict over time requires secure supply lines, mobility, and coordination. Whether provided by domestic infrastructure or external assistance, strong logistical systems allow combatants to launch and maintain major campaigns.
4. 4. Non-state actor heavy weapons: When armed groups acquire heavy weaponry, such as artillery, drones, or armoured vehicles, the nature of warfare shifts. These tools enable direct engagements with state forces, increasing both lethality and the likelihood of retaliation.
5. 5. Significant external support: External support, whether in the form of funding, arms, intelligence, or troops, is a consistent driver of escalation. It allows warring parties to maintain operations beyond their own capacities and hardens the political stakes of war by drawing in outside interests.
6. 6. Private military contractors: In recent years, private military and security companies (PMSCs) have added a new dimension to this dynamic. These actors often operate with military-grade capacity and limited accountability, further intensifying conflicts and complicating resolution efforts.
7. 7. High levels of ethnic exclusion: Social and political structures also shape conflict trajectories. Where ethnic groups are systematically excluded from political power or targeted as threats, violence tends to become more entrenched and indiscriminate. Ethnic exclusion often turns political struggles into existential battles, reducing space for compromise and increasing the risk of atrocities.  
8. 8. Fratricidal coercion: This is closely tied to the use of fratricidal coercion, where leaders enforce discipline through punishment or fear, even against their own troops, contributing to high casualty rates and extreme tactics.
9. 9. Conflict instrumentalisation: Narrative framing plays a critical role in escalation as well. When political elites instrumentalise conflict, using it to mobilise support, suppress dissent, or pursue ideological goals, they increase polarisation and reduce the likelihood of negotiated settlement. Instrumentalisation shifts the function of violence from tactical to symbolic, entrenching hostilities and legitimising prolonged war.

These escalation dynamics rarely appear in isolation. The most devastating conflicts tend to exhibit several of these factors in combination. Recognising them offers valuable insight not only into how wars evolve, but how they might be prevented or de-escalated through targeted policy, diplomacy, and peacebuilding.

Historical examples of the factors driving conflict escalation

The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and Ethiopia’s Tigray War (2020–2022), despite being over 80 years apart, are useful examples to illustrate how these escalation dynamics operate in distinct contexts. Both demonstrate how the convergence of multiple factors transforms conflict into catastrophe. 

The Spanish Civil War

The Spanish Civil War began with a military uprising against the elected Republican government. The initial violence unfolded in major urban centres like Madrid and Barcelona, placing immediate pressure on the state and drawing rapid countermeasures. Both sides mobilised quickly and secured significant external support; Germany and Italy backed the Nationalists, while the Republicans received assistance from the Soviet Union and international volunteers. This internationalisation elevated the conflict into a broader ideological confrontation. 

Logistical infrastructure and access to conventional military hardware enabled prolonged campaigns across accessible terrain. Cities, roads, and railways became battlegrounds in a war that featured aerial bombardments, artillery duels, and sieges. The ideological framing of the war –– fascism versus communism –– deepened polarisation and legitimised mass violence.  

Although ethnic exclusion was not a dominant feature of the Spanish Civil War, religious and regional divisions contributed to the intensity of violence. Fratricidal coercion was also present, with both sides enforcing internal discipline through fear and punishment, in particular the execution of deserters. Though PMSCs did not exist in their modern form, the involvement of foreign advisers, volunteers, and military assets served a similar escalatory role. The war left hundreds of thousands dead and set the stage for decades of repression. 

Ethiopia’s Tigray War

Closer to the present day and in a completely distinctive cultural context, the Tigray War offers another example of these factors at play in a sudden and catastrophic escalation of conflict. What began as a political rift between Ethiopia’s federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) escalated into full-scale war following a surprise TPLF attack on federal military bases. The conflict’s urban origin, targeting strategic sites in the city of Mekelle, triggered an immediate military response. 

The federal counteroffensive was bolstered by Eritrean forces and Amhara regional militias, reflecting high operational and logistical capacity. Tigrayan forces quickly captured heavy weaponry and launched offensives into neighbouring regions. The involvement of external actors, including drone support from the United Arab Emirates and military assistance from Iran and Türkiye, dramatically enhanced the scope and lethality of the conflict. 

Ethnic exclusion was central to the war’s escalation. Tigrayans were targeted in other parts of Ethiopia, while the TPLF framed its struggle in existential terms. This polarisation transformed the conflict into one of identity survival.  

Reports of fratricidal coercion, particularly among Eritrean conscripts, suggest that coercive discipline practices further fuelled violence. The TPLF and federal government both used strategic narratives to mobilise support and demonise the other, instrumentalising the war to justify mass mobilisation and repression. 

Though the war lasted just over two years, it resulted in up to 600,000 deaths, making it the deadliest conflict in terms of annual fatalities in a single country since the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The convergence of escalation factors made de-escalation difficult and rendered humanitarian access nearly impossible at the height of the crisis.

Future prospects: Conflict escalation prevention

Escalation is not random. It is driven by identifiable dynamics that interact to intensify violence and entrench conflict. The Spanish Civil War and the Tigray War show how these factors play out in different eras but with similarly devastating consequences.  

Moreover, these factors are also not merely a framework for analysing the past. Rather, they provide a means to understand the places where simmering hostilities in the present are most at risk of erupting into larger and more lethal conflicts.  

Recognising conflict escalation factors therefore offers not only a tool for analysis but a foundation for prevention. In an increasingly unstable world, responding to conflict means not just reacting to outbreaks of violence but understanding the structures that allow that violence to spiral.