I will describe some joint work with Alex Suciu and Sergey Yuzvinsky.  We construct a combinatorial framework for proving cohomological vanishing results on certain classes of spaces, by means of a Mayer-Vietoris-type spectral sequence and certain Cohen-Macaulayness hypotheses. The spaces include complex hyperplane complements, their De Concini-Procesi compactifications, and configuration spaces of points in tori. In particular, we generalize classical vanishing results due to Kohno, Esnault, Schechtman and Vieweg, and more recent work of Davis, Januszkiewicz, Leary and Okun.