Amartya Sen defines entitlement as command over resources that permits a household to have access to essential goods and services to sustain life within the legal and established social norms and practices. Entitlement failure occurs when a household's command over all available combinations of resources does not ensure sufficient provisions of food to avoid starvation. This paper provides an overview of the literature on causal relations between civil war and households' entitlements. The paper suggests a conceptual framework for empirically analysing the impact of armed political conflict on household entitlements. It develops a composite index as a tool to analyse the impact of civil war on household entitlements and to guide policy in the context of conflict-related international humanitarian interventions. The key contribution of this paper is to suggest an empirical framework for the quantitative measurement of the impact of civil war on household entitlements and to improve targeting criteria in post-conflict rehabilitation efforts.