Civil WarsPub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/13698249.2023.2253617
Rebecca Tapscott, Daniel Rincón Machón
{"title":"25 Years of Civil Wars: Identifying Key Developments Through the Reviews Section","authors":"Rebecca Tapscott, Daniel Rincón Machón","doi":"10.1080/13698249.2023.2253617","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13698249.2023.2253617","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This introductory essay to the Reviews Section of Civil Wars 25th Anniversary Special Issue explores key paradigms in the field of conflict studies, and how they have evolved, ranging from new and critical approaches to knowledge production; to conceptualisations of political violence and civil war as dynamic, relational, and potentially order-making and a new demand to centre research ethics in our work. Among other things, this introduction calls on scholars of civil wars to cultivate and maintain spaces for critical dialogue and reflection – not just on methods and findings but also on broader questions of the processes and politics of knowledge production – to ensure the health and advancement of our sub-field.","PeriodicalId":51785,"journal":{"name":"Civil Wars","volume":"16 1","pages":"554 - 561"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139364266","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Civil WarsPub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/13698249.2023.2253046
Matthijs Bogaards
{"title":"Refreshing Our Memory of a Classic: Mansfield and Snyder’s Electing to Fight","authors":"Matthijs Bogaards","doi":"10.1080/13698249.2023.2253046","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13698249.2023.2253046","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51785,"journal":{"name":"Civil Wars","volume":"104 1","pages":"589 - 594"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139363625","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Civil WarsPub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/13698249.2023.2253101
Anisa Abeytia, Esther Brito Ruiz, John Sunday Ojo, Taha Alloosh
{"title":"Do No Harm: The Role of Humanitarian Aid and Neutrality in Protracting Civil Wars","authors":"Anisa Abeytia, Esther Brito Ruiz, John Sunday Ojo, Taha Alloosh","doi":"10.1080/13698249.2023.2253101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13698249.2023.2253101","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT We review the impact of humanitarian actors in civil war through the examination of the concepts of neutrality and impartiality – embedded within the ‘do no harm’ principle. We argue that despite the rationale of principles seeking to detach international action from the embodied dynamics of conflict, these governing tenets have effectively served to reinforce power discrepancies between authoritarian regimes, opposition forces, and civilians in civil wars. Because humanitarian practices have so often been co-opted to strengthen the position of authoritarian regimes and inflict harm, we trace their impact in conflict networks and assess whether they serve to further protract and unbalance civil war.","PeriodicalId":51785,"journal":{"name":"Civil Wars","volume":"116 1","pages":"341 - 366"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139363834","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Civil WarsPub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/13698249.2023.2253050
Anastasia Shesterinina
{"title":"Humanising Political Violence: Lee Ann Fujii’s Legacies for Civil War Studies","authors":"Anastasia Shesterinina","doi":"10.1080/13698249.2023.2253050","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13698249.2023.2253050","url":null,"abstract":"This review highlights Lee Ann Fujii’s legacy of humanising our research on, and understanding of, political violence and her contributions on the social embeddedness of participation in violence, the endogeneity of social categories to violence and embodied and performative dimensions of violence. It argues that civil war scholars should draw on Fujii’s relational approach as an ethical radar for the methods we use as a reality check on our analytical frameworks.","PeriodicalId":51785,"journal":{"name":"Civil Wars","volume":"43 1","pages":"577 - 588"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139364169","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Civil WarsPub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/13698249.2023.2249721
Giulia Piccolino
{"title":"The Resolution of Civil Wars: Changing International Norms of Peace-Making and the Academic Consensus","authors":"Giulia Piccolino","doi":"10.1080/13698249.2023.2249721","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13698249.2023.2249721","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Since the end of the Cold War, the belief that the international community has a responsibility to support negotiated solutions to civil wars has exercised an enduring influence on research and policy making. However, this belief has relatively recent roots. This article looks at how changing international norms have influenced the way academic researchers view civil wars and expect them to end. The lack of interest in solving internal conflicts during the Cold War was matched among academics by a focus on other security issues and a belief that most civil wars could not be negotiated, although a minority of scholars disagreed. After the Cold War, a new international regime for solving civil wars has emerged, with the active support of a large share of the academic community. However, scholars have also criticised the way Western priorities have shaped liberal peace-making attempts and reflected on the assumptions underlying international conflict resolution. Paradoxically, while the academic community has become increasingly optimistic, the post-Cold War approach has fallen into crisis, due to geopolitical transformations and a change in the nature of contemporary insurgencies. At the end of this article, I suggest new avenues for research in the changing international order.","PeriodicalId":51785,"journal":{"name":"Civil Wars","volume":"3 1","pages":"290 - 316"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139364270","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Civil WarsPub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/13698249.2023.2250314
Paul Staniland
{"title":"The Evolution of Civil Wars Research: From Civil War to Political Violence","authors":"Paul Staniland","doi":"10.1080/13698249.2023.2250314","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13698249.2023.2250314","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this reflection I argue that the last 25 years have seen three broad ‘waves’ of work on civil conflict, broadly understood. The first responded to the civil wars and ethnic conflicts of the 1990s, while the second expanded dramatically to take on a variety of questions around violence and organisation in civil wars. The current wave is moving the field towards a broader study of political violence writ large, rather than civil wars per se. I situate the evolution of my own work within this broader trajectory, in particular its engagement with both the second and third waves.","PeriodicalId":51785,"journal":{"name":"Civil Wars","volume":"8 1","pages":"187 - 207"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139363559","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Civil WarsPub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/13698249.2023.2249326
Jacqui Cho, Dana M. Landau
{"title":"In Search of the Golden Formula: Trends in Peace Mediation Research and Practice","authors":"Jacqui Cho, Dana M. Landau","doi":"10.1080/13698249.2023.2249326","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13698249.2023.2249326","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper examines how the research on, and the practice of, peace mediation has evolved in the past 25 years, with a particular focus on the hypothesised factors that explain mediation ‘success’ and argues for an explicit re-centring of the political in peacemaking. The analysis highlights how research on peacemaking has seen a growth of quantitative studies, while at the same time the practice field of peace mediation has been characterised by a process of professionalisation. We argue that in parallel to these two trends, there has been a shift away from focusing on exogeneous factors, such as those pertaining to the conflict context, to explain ‘success’ or ‘failure’ towards those endogenous to the peace process. A rapidly growing literature on elements of peace process design ranging from inclusivity, mediator characteristics, mediation styles, as well as the substance of negotiated agreements has both informed and been informed by developments in the practitioner community of mediation. These mutually reinforcing trends, while enriching the field, risk portraying mediation as a technical and de-politicised exercise and create inflated expectations of the role and capacity of mediators. We illustrate these trends with a discussion of the case of UN peacemaking in Yemen.","PeriodicalId":51785,"journal":{"name":"Civil Wars","volume":"7 1","pages":"317 - 340"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139363707","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Civil WarsPub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/13698249.2023.2250699
Corinna Jentzsch, Abbey Steele
{"title":"Social Control in Civil Wars","authors":"Corinna Jentzsch, Abbey Steele","doi":"10.1080/13698249.2023.2250699","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13698249.2023.2250699","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The primacy of territorial control in theories of civil war has advanced our understanding of war dynamics, most notably lethal violence, but has hindered our understanding of the distinct ways in which armed groups seek control over people. We propose to complement territorial control by separately conceptualising social control, which we define as the extent to which armed groups have access to people and their resources. Access to people requires different tactics compared to access to territory, because people are mobile. We develop a framework in which state and non-state armed groups choose whether to prioritise territorial or social control first in order to gain sovereignty, which requires both territorial and social control. Alternatively, armed groups choose to pursue territorial control or social control only, resulting in corridors or social networks, respectively. We illustrate the advantages of the framework by showing how it allows us to analyse armed groups’ tactics to control access to people, to connect research agendas on armed group violence, governance, and civilian displacement, and to better conceptualise armed group power and strength.","PeriodicalId":51785,"journal":{"name":"Civil Wars","volume":"150 1","pages":"452 - 471"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139363909","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Civil WarsPub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/13698249.2023.2250274
Megan A. Stewart
{"title":"One Perspective on the Evolution of Civil Wars Research","authors":"Megan A. Stewart","doi":"10.1080/13698249.2023.2250274","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13698249.2023.2250274","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay presents a perspective on the intellectual history and development of the field of civil wars. It argues that scholarship on civil wars has its origins in research on revolution and contentious politics. Over time, work on civil wars grew to become its own distinct research programme. The evolution of this programme has been characterised by three broad trends: conceptual and measurement refinement, a search for the optimal unit of analysis, and a reimagining of what is political in the context of civil wars. The intersection of these trends – which measures, assumptions, units, and concepts – tended to produce intellectual traditions within the civil wars field. The author contextualises herself within these traditions, then presents the promises and pitfalls of these underlying trends in the field for future research.","PeriodicalId":51785,"journal":{"name":"Civil Wars","volume":"2016 1","pages":"208 - 228"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139364075","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Civil WarsPub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/13698249.2023.2249325
Hilary Matfess
{"title":"New Frontiers in Rebel Socialisation: Considering Care and Marriage","authors":"Hilary Matfess","doi":"10.1080/13698249.2023.2249325","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13698249.2023.2249325","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Non-state armed groups confront myriad challenges, but perhaps primary among them is the issue of how to transform civilians into rebels. The study of socialisation in non-state armed groups has traced the various strategies that rebels have adopted to teach rebels what they are fighting for, their position within the organisation and what behaviour is expected of them. The effects of rebel socialisation do not only affect the dynamics of how war is fought but may also extend well-past the end of the war, influencing possessive and social networks. While early studies in this field emphasise top-down (or vertical) processes and the use of violence as a socialisation mechanism, recent studies address quotidian and horizontal socialisation. This article will discuss how our understanding of rebel socialisation processes has developed over time. I introduce a two-by-two framework to understand how the process of socialisation (horizontal or vertical) and tactics used (violent or non-violent) produce unique forms of rebel socialisation. In so doing, this paper highlights future areas of study, particularly on the relatively under-researched area of non-violent, horizontal socialisation and on vertically-ordained forms of horizontal socialisation. In this article, I reiterate the call for greater attention to ‘love and care’ in security studies and offer marriage as an important, but under-appreciated, venue for rebel socialisation as a proof of concept of how taking care as a form of socialisation seriously can improve our understanding of the dynamics of rebellion and rebel experiences.","PeriodicalId":51785,"journal":{"name":"Civil Wars","volume":"10 1","pages":"472 - 491"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139364272","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}