Civil Wars: Escalation and De-Escalation

ABSTRACT

When we study civil wars and conflicts we tend to conceptualise them as occurring in stages: starting from domestic political disagreements, to demonstrations and protests escalating into violence and war. How armed conflicts end is often seen as the reverse process, moving from high intensity armed interaction, to a drawing down, war weariness, negotiations and termination, followed by a transition to peace. This contribution argues that this is a faulty understanding of conflict, which obscures rather than illuminates. More attention to the processes of aggravation of conflict and the many leaps and bounds of the use of pressure and coercion is warranted. Similarly, the drawing down of conflict is not necessarily linked to a linear progression of de-escalation. Sometimes armed conflicts end at the pinnacle of violence. This article focuses on the state of the art in the field of escalation and de-escalation in the study of civil war and conflict. Moreover, it will offer an invitation to scholars to focus more on these phenomena by outlining where our present knowledge and insights fall short.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Whereas Bartusevičius & Gleditsch speak of civil conflict in their definition, we use the term conflict without the adjective ‘civil’ – this given that the term civil conflict is associated with low-intensity civil war in the conflict-studies literature. We note that this association is strong but not exclusive. There are many examples of ‘civil wars’, which were fought in a conventional manner, e.g., the Spanish Civil War. We also adjust this definition to allow for the occurrence of conflict between non-state actors.

2. For an attempt to conceptually separate different expressions of conflict; Duyvesteyn and Fumerton (2009).

3. For the case of social uprisings, see Shaheen (2015); for the case of social movements, see Tilly and Wood (2016); for the case of how variables identified as causing civil war affect other forms of conflict, see Cunningham and Lemke (2014). For an analysis of the relationship between different forms of conflict in processes of state building, see Tarrow (2015); for an analysis of the escalation of conflict towards civil war, see Blair and Sambanis (2020); for an analysis of the trajectories of escalation of conflict in autocracies, see Rød and Weidmann (2021); for an analysis of the escalation of non-violent movements towards violence, see Ryckman (2020); for a simulation model to analyse the connection between different stages of political turmoil see Hegre et al. (2017); for a description of the different stages of processes of mobilisation see Shultziner and Goldberg (2019); for the processes of escalation of conflict in relation to political autonomy see (Germann and Sambanis 2021).

4. See for an example of this type of reasoning (Kocaman et al. 2023).

5. Tensions had been simmering between El Salvador and Honduras, related to the migration of Salvadorans to Honduras in preceding decades before. As land (whether legally or illegally occupied) by Salvadorans was expropriated, and rights of Salvadorans in Honduras were limited, this fuelled the animosity between countries. A series of soccer matches between El Salvador and Honduras (qualifier matches for the 1970 soccer world cup) were followed by violence between soccer fans, which led Salvador to find the justification to dissolve diplomatic ties and declare war with Honduras (Cable 1969). This illustrates how grievances associated with a soccer match, something that would not necessarily be associated with a ‘rationality’ framework, can be central in explaining the emergence of war.

6. An example is the discussion about the ‘strategic corporal’ (Krulak 1999).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fabio Andrés Díaz Pabón

Fabio Andrés Díaz Pabón is a research fellow in Sustainable Development and the African 2063 agenda, hosted by the African Centre of Excellence for Inequality Research (ACEIR) of the University of Cape Town, and a research associate at the department of Political and International Studies at Rhodes University. His research interests are related to politics, conflict, development, inequality and economics from a comparative perspective.

Isabelle Duyvesteyn

Isabelle Duyvesteyn is Professor of International Studies at the Institute of History at Leiden University in the Netherlands. She completed her PhD at the Department of War Studies at King’s College in London. Previously she has worked at the Royal Military Academy in the Netherlands, the Netherlands Institute for International Relations and the Department of History of International Relations at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Her research has focused on the nature of war and peace in the developing world, terrorism and insurgency and the strategy of non-state actors. She has served as a member of the National Advisory Council for International Affairs assigned to advise the Netherlands government on issues of peace and security, a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Netherlands Defence Academy and a member of several book and journal editorial boards, notably the Journal of Strategic Studies, and Small Wars and Insurgencies.