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This book offers an original assessment of the ways in which the sociocultural code of blood revenge and its modern remnants shape irregular warfare. Despite being a common driver of communal violence, blood revenge has received little attention from scholars. With many civil wars and insurgencies occurring in areas where the custom lingers, strengthening our understanding of blood revenge is essential for discerning how conflicts change and evolve. Drawing upon extensive multidisciplinary evidence, this book is the first in the literature on civil war and insurgency to analyse the impact of blood revenge and its modern remnants on irregular warfare. Even when blood revenge undergoes erosion, its unregulated version still shapes the social fabric of insurgency, although in different ways than its institutionalised counterpart. At times of political instability, the presence of a culture of retaliation weighs heavily on the dynamics of violent mobilisation, target selection, recruitment, and disengagement. This book brings in evidence from dozens of conflicts, providing unprecedented insights into how a better understanding of blood revenge can improve military blueprints for irregular warfare. This book will be of much interest to students of insurgency, terrorism, military and strategic studies, anthropology, and sociology, as well as to decision-makers and irregular warfare professionals.

Since World War II, civil wars have replaced interstate wars as the most frequent and deadly form of armed conflict globally. How do we account for when and where civil wars are likely to occur, when and how they are likely to end, and whether or not they will recur? In this timely book, leading scholars accessibly guide students through cutting-edge research on the onset, duration, outcomes, and recurrence of civil wars, as well as the ongoing consequences of conflicts in war-torn countries such as Syria, Sudan, and Rwanda. In mapping out the current state of our knowledge about civil conflicts, the authors also identify what we do not know about civil wars. With a consistent approach across chapters and through a wide variety of cases, the contributors collectively help readers understand some of the most pressing questions in conflict and security studies and illustrates how scholars answer them. This authoritative text offers both an accessible and current overview of the state of the field and an agenda for future research.The second features: An entirely new chapter on pro-government militias and rebels as criminal groups (Chapter 16)Analysis of new trends in civil war data collection that have enabled us to understand geographic and temporal patterns of armed conflictNew directions in transitional justice institutions in post-conflict environments, the “resource curse,” the role of women, and the relationship between the environment and civil conflictNew material on mediation of conflict and peace agreement implementation, and peacekeeping Examples drawn from the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Abusive leaders are now held accountable for their crimes in a way that was unimaginable just a few decades ago. What are the consequences of this recent push for international justice? In The Justice Dilemma, Daniel Krcmaric explains why the'golden parachute'of exile is no longer an attractive retirement option for oppressive rulers. He argues that this is both a blessing and a curse: leaders culpable for atrocity crimes fight longer civil wars because they lack good exit options, but the threat of international prosecution deters some leaders from committing atrocities in the first place. The Justice Dilemma therefore diagnoses an inherent tension between conflict resolution and atrocity prevention, two of the signature goals of the international community.Krcmaric also sheds light on several important puzzles in world politics. Why do some rulers choose to fight until they are killed or captured? Why not simply save oneself by going into exile? Why do some civil conflicts last so much longer than others? Why has state-sponsored violence against civilians fallen in recent years? While exploring these questions, Krcmaric marshals statistical evidence on patterns of exile, civil war duration, and mass atrocity onset. He also reconstructs the decision-making processes of embattled leaders—including Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, Charles Taylor of Liberia, and Blaise Compaoré of Burkina Faso—to show how contemporary international justice both deters atrocities and prolongs conflicts.

This book looks into four areas of our world's international security crisis: the growing threat of America's homegrown jihadists, the continuing rise of terrorism, the causes of gross violations of human rights, and the pervasiveness of civil war.When American jihadists join such international terrorist organizations as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and Al Qaeda, the danger to security and stability is often magnified on both global and domestic fronts. The global rise of terrorism in turn causes a deterioration in the quality of human rights for politically disadvantaged people or minority groups within a national territory; meanwhile, the internal crisis created by terrorist violence and human rights violations can expedite the development of civil war, which is likely to endanger domestic and international stability.Taking a consistent theoretical and empirical approach, Emerging Security Challenges: American Jihad, Terrorism, Civil War, and Human Rights explicates the relationships among these four closely related areas of concern for national security. Each chapter presents systematic, empirical evidence of security trends for more than 100 sample countries, determined using the most current statistical methods, and concludes with practical policy recommendations.

This book provides an analytical framework for understanding how the concept of quality peace can be used to evaluate post-conflict peacebuilding, using social science, statistics, and case studies. Including contributions from more than 20 researchers and practitioners, it argues that the quality of the peace in a post-conflict state relates to the extent to which peace accords are implemented, the agreed-upon mechanism for the non-violent resolution of the conflict, and the available social space for civil and political actors. To arrive at the concept of'quality peace', the authors evaluate the existing literature and identify a lack of a satisfactory means of measuring outcomes, and consequently how these might be researched comparatively. The volume problematizes the'quality peace'concept as a way to understand the origins of armed conflict as well as problems deriving from the conflict dynamics and the need for social, political, and economic changes in the post-conflict periods. The book emphasizes five dimensions as crucial for quality peace in a post-accord society. Negotiations and agreements not only aim at avoiding the return of war but also seek to: (1) promote reconciliation, (2) develop mechanisms for resolving future disputes, (3) provide for reliable security, (4) open economic opportunities for marginalized segments of the population, and (5) generate space for civil society. These five dimensions together provide for quality peace after war. They are studied in the context of internal armed conflicts in which multiple parties have signed a peace agreement.This book will be of great interest to students of peace and conflict studies, civil wars, global governance, security studies, and International Relations in general.

Results from the book lay the groundwork for the systematic analysis of an understudied form of civilian abuse. The book will also be useful to policymakers and organizations seeking to understand and to mitigate the horrors of wartime rape.Rape is common during wartime, but even within the context of the same war, some armed groups perpetrate rape on a massive scale while others never do. In Rape during Civil War Dara Kay Cohen examines variation in the severity and perpetrators of rape using an original dataset of reported rape during all major civil wars from 1980 to 2012. Cohen also conducted extensive fieldwork, including interviews with perpetrators of wartime rape, in three postconflict counties, finding that rape was widespread in the civil wars of the Sierra Leone and Timor-Leste but was far less common during El Salvador's civil war.Cohen argues that armed groups that recruit their fighters through the random abduction of strangers use rape—and especially gang rape—to create bonds of loyalty and trust between soldiers. The statistical evidence confirms that armed groups that recruit using abduction are more likely to perpetrate rape than are groups that use voluntary methods, even controlling for other confounding factors. Important findings from the fieldwork—across cases—include that rape, even when it occurs on a massive scale, rarely seems to be directly ordered. Instead, former fighters describe participating in rape as a violent socialization practice that served to cut ties with fighters'past lives and to signal their commitment to their new groups.

Since World War II, civil wars have replaced interstate wars as the most frequent and deadly form of armed conflict globally. How do we account for when and where civil wars are likely to occur, when and how they are likely to end, and whether or not they will recur? In this timely book, leading scholars guide us through what the latest research tells us about the onset, duration, outcomes, and recurrence of civil wars, as well as the ongoing consequences of conflicts in war-torn countries such as Syria, Sudan, and Rwanda. In mapping out the current state of our knowledge about civil conflicts, the authors also identify what we do not know about civil wars. The book describes new directions in civil-war research, including transitional justice institutions in post-conflict environments, the “resource curse,” the role of women, and the relationship between the environment and civil conflict. The authors also highlight new trends in civil-war data collection that have enabled scholars to examine the geographic and temporal patterns of armed conflict. This authoritative text offers both an accessible and current overview of current knowledge and an agenda for future research. With contributions by Halvard Buhaug, David E. Cunningham, Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham, Jacqueline H. R. DeMeritt, Karl DeRouen Jr., Paul F. Diehl, Andrew Enterline, Erika Forsberg, Scott Gates, Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, Nils Petter Gleditsch, Caroline A. Hartzell, Cullen Hendrix, Jacob Kathman, Christopher Linebarger, T. David Mason, Erik Melander, Sara McLaughlin Mitchell, Alyssa K. Prorok, Idean Salehyan, Lee J. M. Seymour, Megan Shannon, Benjamin Smith, David Sobek, Clayton L. Thyne, Henrik Urdal, Joseph K. Young

The 2013 debate over whether the United States should intervene in the Syrian conflict raised important questions regarding the benefits countries receive when they intervene in civil wars, and how those benefits are distributed to the citizens of the intervening country. To address these lingering questions this book offers readers a comprehensive examination of the intervention process, examining the decision to intervene, what motivates states, and how their intervention shapes the conflict process. Most, importantly, the book examines how states benefit from their interventions and the distribution of intervenor benefits. Specially two questions are addressed: What are the benefits of intervention for intervening countries? And, how are benefits distributed within the intervenors society? Using evidence compiled from three case studies (El Salvador, The Philippines, and Sri Lanka), this book examines what motivated states to intervene, how they intervened, what they got from their intervention, and how the benefits of the intervention were distributed among the public. Arguing that foreign policy and security decision making is isolated from the general public, this book argues that citizens gain little from indirect interventions into civil wars.

Intrastate conflicts, such as civil wars and ethnic confrontations, are the predominant form of organized violence in the world today. But internal strife can destabilize entire regions, drawing in people living beyond state borders—particularly those who share ideology, ethnicity, or kinship with one of the groups involved. These nonstate actors may not be enlisted in formal armies or political parties, but they can play a significant role in a conflict. For example, when foreign volunteers forge alliances with domestic groups, they tend to attract other foreign interventions and may incite the state to centralize its power. Diasporan populations, depending on their connection to their homeland, might engage politically through financial support or overt aggression, either exacerbating or mitigating the conflict.Nonstate Actors in Intrastate Conflicts takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the ways external individuals and groups become entangled with volatile states and how they influence the outcome of hostilities within a country's borders. Editors Dan Miodownik and Oren Barak bring together top scholars to examine case studies in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, and Turkey in order to explore the manifold roles of external nonstate actors. By shedding light on these overlooked participants—whose causes and consequences can turn the tide of war—Nonstate Actors in Intrastate Conflicts provides a critical new perspective on the development and neutralization of civil war and ethnic violence.Contributors: Oren Barak, Chanan Cohen, Robert A. Fitchette, Orit Gazit, Gallia Lindenstrauss, Nava Löwenheim, David Malet, Dan Miodownik, Maayan Mor, Avraham Sela, Gabriel (Gabi) Sheffer, Omer Yair.

This volume explores the nature of civil war in the modern world and in historical perspective. Civil wars represent the principal form of armed conflict since the end of the Second World War, and certainly in the contemporary era. The nature and impact of civil wars suggests that these conflicts reflect and are also a driving force for major societal change. In this sense, Understanding Civil Wars: Continuity and change in intrastate conflict argues that the nature of civil war is not fundamentally changing in nature.The book includes a thorough consideration of patterns and types of intrastate conflict and debates relating to the causes, impact, and ‘changing nature'of war. A key focus is on the political and social driving forces of such conflict and its societal meanings, significance and consequences. The author also explores methodological and epistemological challenges related to studying and understanding intrastate war. A range of questions and debates are addressed. What is the current knowledge regarding the causes and nature of armed intrastate conflict? Is it possible to produce general, cross-national theories on civil war which have broad explanatory relevance? Is the concept of ‘civil wars'empirically meaningful in an era of globalization and transnational war? Has intrastate conflict fundamentally changed in nature? Are there historical patterns in different types of intrastate conflict? What are the most interesting methodological trends and debates in the study of armed intrastate conflict? How are narratives about the causes and nature of civil wars constructed around ideas such as ethnic conflict, separatist conflict and resource conflict?This book will be of much interest to students of civil wars, intrastate conflict, security studies and international relations in general.

There are currently more than 30 active civil wars worldwide. An Introduction to Civil Wars provides a comprehensive overview of the civil wars that have taken place globally since World War II. The text opens with a discussion of the human and economic costs of civil war, and then systematically examines all aspects of civil wars: civil war patterns, types, and causes; the effect of natural resources; conflict duration, outcomes, and termination; peace agreements; counterinsurgency; terrorism; international intervention; and post-conflict issues. Author Karl DeRouen, Jr. draws on the latest empirical research and major theoretical debates and connects them to extended case studies of current conflict. Pedagogical features -- tables, figures, maps, photos, a comprehensive bibliography, lists of suggested readings, and an Appendix listing all civil wars since 1946 -- make the book an especially useful research tool for undergraduates and graduate students in political science and public policy.

Rebellion, insurgency, civil war-conflict within a society is customarily treated as a matter of domestic politics and analysts generally focus their attention on local causes. Yet fighting between governments and opposition groups is rarely confined to the domestic arena.'Internal'wars often spill across national boundaries, rebel organizations frequently find sanctuaries in neighboring countries, and insurgencies give rise to disputes between states. In Rebels without Borders, which will appeal to students of international and civil war and those developing policies to contain the regional diffusion of conflict, Idean Salehyan examines transnational rebel organizations in civil conflicts, utilizing cross-national datasets as well as in-depth case studies. He shows how external Contra bases in Honduras and Costa Rica facilitated the Nicaraguan civil war and how the Rwandan civil war spilled over into the Democratic Republic of the Congo, fostering a regional war. He also looks at other cross-border insurgencies, such as those of the Kurdish PKK and Taliban fighters in Pakistan. Salehyan reveals that external sanctuaries feature in the political history of more than half of the world's armed insurgencies since 1945, and are also important in fostering state-to-state conflicts. Rebels who are unable to challenge the state on its own turf look for mobilization opportunities abroad. Neighboring states that are too weak to prevent rebel access, states that wish to foster instability in their rivals, and large refugee diasporas provide important opportunities for insurgent groups to establish external bases. Such sanctuaries complicate intelligence gathering, counterinsurgency operations, and efforts at peacemaking. States that host rebels intrude into negotiations between governments and opposition movements and can block progress toward peace when they pursue their own agendas.

This book explores how governance structures - domestic political institutions, international peacekeeping efforts, armed interventions by other states - and natural resources affect the onset, dynamics and the termination of civil wars.Written by leading researchers in the field of conflict research, it provides new insights into, and offers fresh perspectives on the role of governance structures and resources in civil conflict, suggesting that many of the same set of factors play important roles in the onset and dynamics of civil conflict as well as in the termination of such conflicts and in post-conflict stability. Presenting a variety of theoretical approaches and case studies on India, Sudan, the Basque country and Costa Rica, Governance, Resources and Civil Conflict will be of interest to students and scholars of politics, international relations and conflict studies.

'Iraq is rapidly descending into all-out civil war. Unfortunately, the United States probably will not be able to just walk away from the chaos. Even setting aside the humanitarian nightmare that will ensue, a full-scale civil war would likely consume more than Iraq: historically, such massive conflicts have often had highly deleterious effects on neighboring countries and other outside states. Spillover from an Iraq civil war could be disastrous.'Thus begins this sobering analysis of what the near future of Iraq could look like, and what America can do to reduce the threat of wider conflict. Preventing spillover of the Iraqi conflict into neighboring states must be a top priority. In explaining how that can be accomplished, Daniel Byman and Kenneth Pollack draw on their own considerable expertise as well as relevant precedents. The authors scrutinize several recent civil wars, including Lebanon, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Bosnia. After synthesizing those experiences into lessons on how civil wars affect other nations, Byman and Pollack draw from them to produce recommendations for U.S. policy. Even while the Bush Administration attempts to prevent further deterioration of the situation in Iraq, it needs to be planning how to deal with a full-scale civil war if one develops.

The recent efforts to reach a settlement of the enduring and tragic conflict in Darfur demonstrate how important it is to understand what factors contribute most to the success of such efforts. In this book, Caroline Hartzell and Matthew Hoddie review data from all negotiated civil war settlements between 1945 and 1999 in order to identify these factors.What they find is that settlements are more likely to produce an enduring peace if they involve construction of a diversity of power-sharing and power-dividing arrangements between former adversaries. The strongest negotiated settlements prove to be those in which former rivals agree to share or divide state power across its economic, military, political, and territorial dimensions.This finding is a significant addition to the existing literature, which tends to focus more on the role that third parties play in mediating and enforcing agreements. Beyond the quantitative analyses, the authors include a chapter comparing contrasting cases of successful and unsuccessful settlements in the Philippines and Angola, respectively.

In the early 1990s a number of violent civil wars and large-scale ethnic crises shocked the world. In Rwanda, Bosnia, Chechnya and elsewhere atrocities were committed that led to hundreds of thousands of dead and displaced people.Explaining the origins and dynamics of such inhuman actions and events, this new sensitive and detailed analysis includes: full analysis of the origins of civil wars, terrorism and ethnic strife insights drawn from across the social sciences practical and topical illustrations of the information provided fully updated assessments with details of key contemporary events Although the number of these conflicts has diminished over the years, the phenomenon has not disappeared: in the Sudan, the Congo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria, Afghanistan and Iraq people are still being killed in large numbers, without authorities being able to avert or end the hostilities. On nine-eleven large-scale terrorist attacks in Washington and New York shocked the world again, and since then other violent events took place in Bali, Casablanca, Riyadh, Moscow, Istanbul and Madrid. This book of concern to all people, because recent history has shown us that such violence can strike everywhere and at any time. The final chapter delivers a number of constructive considerations aiming at the development of policies to prevent and stop such conflicts. This is an important new contribution to tackling the complex challenges of the twenty first century.This book will be of great interest to all students and scholars of contemporary history, development studies, political and social sciences and International Relations.

In The Wars Within, Robin M. Williams Jr. brings together decades of thought about ethnic conflicts in an effort to better understand their dynamics and to lessen their disastrous consequences. Williams presents a worldwide perspective, conscious that many studies of ethnicity focus primarily on the United States. The stakes of struggles can involve both material resources, such as oil, diamonds, and gold, and sociocultural goods, such as group status and cultural distinctiveness. Ethnic conflict, Williams finds, can be portrayed as a set of dynamic processes that may escalate from restrained confrontations over limited issues to devastating ethnic warfare and genocide.Throughout, Williams attends to present-day realities and continually reminds readers that ethnic conflict has human significance and lasting effects. His analysis implies that the military and political behavior of the United States profoundly affects whether faraway places attempt ethnic cooperation or shatter into deadly conflict. The Wars Within ends on a note of mild hope as Williams provides an overview of ways to prevent, moderate, or resolve severe intrastate violence.

Western politicians, pundits, and the public were wholly unprepared for the violent conflicts erupting in eastern and central Europe and the former Soviet Union after the end of the Cold War. The governments emerging from communism lack both the authoritarian control to suppress domestic differences and the democratic power to manage them.Old conflicts resurfaced and new ones were kindled in virulent form from Bosnia to Chechnya. The stability of governments and the status quo of borders have been thrown into question. Actual and threatened disintegration of states in the area is widespread. No reference points have emerged to replace the cold war paradigm. Nor is there a way of knowing which conflicts can be contained within accepted borders and which may spill over. The prospect not only of widening conflict, but also of new precedents challenging old certainties of international life, causes deep concern in western Europe and the United States.Europe has many experienced international organizations under whose umbrella states organize to achieve common purposes. This book asks how they have performed that function. How are these organizations attempting to deal with the many forms of internal conflict that are both the cause and the result of the end of communism and the East-West confrontation? Despite significant organizational and financial resources, the results have been meager. The authors show how difficult it is to achieve effective joint action on a sustained basis. They contend that a concerted effort to discover how to achieve joint action is the necessary next step in mobilizing international organizations for preventing ethno-national conflict.In addition to the editors, the contributors are Diana Chigas, Jarat Chopra, Michael W. Doyle, Keitha Sapsin Fine, David S. Huntington, Christophe Kamp, Jean E. Manas, Elizabeth McClintock, John Pinder, Wolfgang H. Reinicke, Reinhardt Rummel, Melanie H. Stein, Shashi Tharoor, Thomas