The role that inequality (Stewart, 2008), grievances, social cohesion and the presence of state institutions in relation to ethnicity (Wimmer, 1997; Kronenberg, 2012) play in the emergence of armed conflict is still an open research area. To do so, using ethnicity as a unit of analysis (Brubaker, 2006) might prove useful to bypass the challenges posed by the constructivist or primordialist approaches to the subject.To do so a theoretical model that relates the relationship between the provision of public services, social cohesion, presence of state institutions, economic inequality, political participation and the feasibility of rebellion and the existence of armed conflict is presented.