Consolidating and Expanding Civil Wars as a Field of Study: Editorial Reflections, 2006–2010

The start of 2006 saw the journal’s first editorial transition with Clive Jones and Alice Hills taking over as Co-Editors, and James Worrall acting as Assistant Editor. Of course, there were continuities, the journal was still based at Leeds and Clive Jones had been on the founding editorial team (Kennedy‐Pipe and Jones 1998) but there was a new energy and a desire to further broaden the journal’s scope and to further cement its place in the field of study which was rapidly consolidating.

With Iraq having slid into full-scale sectarian civil war, the Taliban re-emerging rapidly in Afghanistan, along with escalating violence in Sri Lanka, the Eastern Congo and elsewhere, the problem of civil wars was omnipresent and the stuff of high politics. While the War on Terror, naturally enough, framed much of this discourse, there was a growing sense of more and more scholars moving into the field and attempting to find wider dynamics and to dig deeper than the debates which had shaped the field in the late 1990s.

The journal wanted to document and explore these conflicts, which were dominating the headlines and shaping the political agenda globally while also picking up emerging trends in the literature and engaging with the formative theoretical debates in the field. The introductory editorial of the new editors’ term, ‘Revisiting Civil War’ (Hills and Jones 2006), began by re-asking key animating questions, such as ‘what is a civil war?’. This basic but profound question was driven by conflicting debates that had emerged about what the root causes of internecine conflict were. Of course, the US-led invasion of Iraq has unleashed sectarian tensions that had long been contained by the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein. Still, the scope and intensity of the ensuing violence, not least the use of suicide bombing to stoke fear and loathing, pointed to a recrudescence of religious identities as being core drivers of a conflict that Washington and its allies could barely contain.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq also highlighted; however, the growing influence of the marketplace in how we understand external intervention in civil wars. The interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq witnessed the exponential rise of Private Military Corporations (PMCs). For many, they remain mercenaries, able and willing to sell their martial expertise to the highest bidder. To be sure, the use of mercenaries in civil wars has a long a pedigree: Yemen, Congo, and Biafra in the 1960s, and Angola in the 1970s bore witness to their capabilities, and bloody excesses. But the corporate nature of their work had already begun to emerge in the UK at least by the 1970s, with former British military personnel being employed by companies to advise states, notably in the Gulf, on security arrangements and the training of their nascent armed forces. The use of PMCs in Iraq and Afghanistan now went beyond pure guns for hire to include advice on logistics and infrastructure projects. Given the reduction in armed forces across the West following the end of the Cold War, PMCs played a useful function for governments unwilling to increase defence spending exponentially while trying to mitigate risk to existing military personnel. While PMCs can be thought of as a form of epistemic community, their legal and normative standing remained, and remains, a subject of heated debate given the opaque nature of their status in international law. Still, as actors, they are very much a feature of external intervention in civil wars and are likely to remain so for the foreseeable future (Jones 2006).

One of the key articles in that first issue of our term was Anthony Vinci’s ‘Greed-Grievance Reconsidered: The Role of Power and Survival in the Motivation of Armed Groups’ (Vinci 2006) which tried to bring new ideas to the increasingly stale and circular debates over the relative importance of greed vs. grievance motivations for civil wars and the choice to participate by individuals (Berdal and Malone 2000, Ballentine and Sherman 2003, Berdal 2005, Hoeffler 2011). By refocusing on the need to survive and ‘pick a gang’ for protection the article was not only challenging the older debates which had shaped the early years of the field but was also at the edge of the new wave of the study of the micro-dynamics of conflict that would later that year be symbolically marked with the publication of Stathis Kalyvas’ seminal The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Kalyvas 2006). Continuing with the journal’s deliberately eclectic tradition of theoretical and methodological pluralism, that first issue of the new editorial team contained articles on the challenges of conflict management using Sri Lanka as a case (Biswas 2006), using IR theories to understand third parties’ roles in disarming conflict actors (Hill 2006) and an examination of the role of tribes as sub-state actors in Jordanian state formation (Alon 2006).

While there had previously been (some) special issues of the journal, the new editors adopted a policy of making these a standard feature as a way of both bringing together groups of scholars and profiling emerging research areas, believing that this would make the journal into a natural place for greater dialogue and collaboration in the field. This process was strongly proactive, especially at first, with the new editors reaching out to promising panels at conferences, instigating special administrative procedures to ensure that special issues progressed through the system in a co-ordinated way and also that they were published as quickly as possible – important in a rapidly growing field. All of this in an era where there was no online journal management software (that would not come until as late as 2015), instead the Assistant Editor had to use email and spreadsheets to manage submissions and monitor peer reviewers!

Special Issues quickly became key to the journal’s success with a series of high-profile issues dealing with a range of new or emerging topics while drawing on a wide range of cases. The second issue of 2006 looked specifically at field experiences of security sector reform, in classic form this took an area which was rising to prominence during this time and examined it from a fresh perspective, i.e., bottom up (e.g., Horn et al. 2006). The following year saw three out of the journal’s four issues being themed special issues. The first focused on assessing dynamics in Iraq, and thus spoke to the main currents dominating discourse during this period (Norell 2007). This was especially well timed as Iraq had slipped fully into sectarian civil war after the bombing of the al-Askari mosque in Samarra on 22 February the year before (Lischer 2008). The second issue was themed around the problem of forced migration in civil war and began to map out a research agenda which might centre on the study of migration and displacement within the field of Civil War Studies as a central issue (e.g., Salehyan 2007). Thus, demonstrating the journal’s continuing desire to broaden the field and study all of its facets and dynamics while drawing on and linking to other fields. The year ended with a special issue which focused very much on the hot topic of the time, that of insurgency and counterinsurgency, examining the very origins and the effectiveness of these approaches to conflict within civil war settings. This issue contained some of the journal’s most cited and read articles to-date, including Downes (2007a) examination of the utility of indiscriminate violence as a COIN strategy and Will Reno’s examination of how patronage politics are used in armed groups (Reno 2007). Importantly, even this issue, in classic Civil Wars fashion, refused to only focus on the conflicts in the headlines and contained articles examining the Lord’s Resistance Army (Bevan 2007) and the conflict in Darfur (Johnston 2007). As the field itself was growing, there was a real sense that the journal was meeting a need. There was a noticeable increase in the number of submissions, especially from the US, as the journal’s profile rose with the wider interest in the field itself.

In 2008, our first issue focused on the idea of ‘sanctuaries’ within civil wars (Innes, 2008) examining sacred spaces (Hassner 2008), online hiding places and the re-shuffling of peoples (Greenhill 2008) into ‘safe spaces’, as a concept it highlighted some of the spatial dynamics of civil wars which were beginning to receive more attention as part of the wider micro-turn in the discipline. Being able to both respond to the needs of a changing discipline and acting as a place where different focuses on what turned out to be a common concept demonstrated the increasing role of Civil Wars not only as a place where work was disseminated but also where work could come into dialogue, and one where editors could not only respond to, but also begin to lead those discussions. Civil Wars also could demonstrate that it was not simply a space for reflections on the conflicts that were ongoing at that moment but was also a place to re-examine the conflicts of the past, for example publishing a special issue re-examining the Jordanian civil war of 1970 during ‘Black September’ (Nevo 2008). While this ‘type’ of article, which re-examined civil wars of decades past, was submitted much less often than standard politics-focused studies, it demonstrated both that the journal could be a home to detailed historical examination that spoke to current trends and that such work was valuable in the longitudinal sense for a field which was still young and hyper-focused on conflicts of the 1990s and early 2000s.

The journal also began to move away from its earlier focus on the onset, causes and dynamics of civil wars around this period pushing into understandings of peace processes, peacebuilding and statebuilding which were fields emerging strongly at this time. Thus, the final issue of 2008 focused on statebuilding with a diverse range of studies focusing on cases as varied as Haiti (Shamsie 2008), Bosnia (Kostić 2008) and Uganda (Schlichte 2008) and with important thematic regard to militias, international intervention and corruption (Deane 2008), and importantly this was also a special issue which tried hard to suggest new methods and approaches to the study of statebuilding processes (Goetze and Guzina 2008).

Towards the end of the first decade of the new century the field had clearly grown substantially and had expanded outwards in many fruitful directions. The micro-turn had not eclipsed the earlier focus on trying to find macro-patterns in causes but had generated many important new findings while also revealing very starkly just how much was left to examine and how little we actually knew about the sociological, cultural, political and economic dimensions of these conflicts. The first issue of 2009 was a special which explored the variety of non-state actors in civil wars, from terrorists (Boulden 2009) and organised criminal gangs (McMullin 2009), to private security companies (Percy 2009), international NGOs (Zaum 2009) and international financial institutions (Hill 2009). While the last volume of the year seemed to encapsulate the micro-agenda when it examined, ‘The Mosaic of Violence’ in Civil War with a series of contributions on the role of riots (Berenschot 2009), livestock raiding (Witsenburg and Adano 2009), violence inside refugee camps (Branch 2009), and the importance of moral economies (Bakonyi 2009). All of these special issues brought together different ideas which both consolidated themes in the field and purposively brought in new areas.

This general foregrounding of special issues did not mean that the journal was not also publishing individual research during this period, of course we were – this was our bread and butter, but more that we saw special issues as being able to better raise the profile of particular areas of research and create enhanced synergies for overlap and productive dialogue. Thus, acting as a win-win for both the journal and the wider field as it consolidated an identity as a specific area of study.

As editors, we also were able to steer the journal in new directions reflecting our own research interests. Thus from Clive’s side, there were more articles appearing on the Middle East – a region which had been less prominent in the literature (Jones 2004), moves to encourage work on, for example, private military companies (Jones 2006) and a desire to bring in more work on groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah (Jones 2001, 2003; Jones and Catignani 2010) which didn’t easily fit into the same kind of categories as, for example, the RUF in Sierra Leone. While, as an Africanist, Alice was able to draw in scholars from a wide range of networks focusing on African conflicts, as well as from her thematic focus on policing (Hills 2001, 2011), security sector reform (Hills 1998, 2000) border security (Hills 2004) and localised dynamics of conflict (Hills 2011, 2016) which fitted well with important new areas for the field more broadly. Having editors who had clear regional and thematic specialisms was a clear plus for the journal, reflecting its desire to publish diverse research both geographically and thematically, as well as opening networks across varied but complimentary fields for the journal.

After focusing on the need to build the journal’s reputation for cutting-edge and exciting research, reflecting the rapid expansion and diversification of the field in the early years, as Civil Wars reputation grew and the volume of submissions rose we began to focus more on the need for a re-invigorated reviews section as a place which would further improve dialogue in the discipline and capture the developments in the large numbers of important books which were now being written on the phenomenon of civil wars. This was important to round out the journal but was not always the easiest of tasks, so it was only really in the last year or so of our tenure that the reviews section became both a regular fixture and one with increased substance. This was partly logistical, because it was not often easy to put reviews that were appropriate with the special issues we were publishing, but also because, as any editor will tell you, securing book reviews is never the simplest of tasks, however with our growing reputation this became much easier than it had been.

Towards the end of 2009 we made the joint decision, as Co-Editors, to step down from editing the journal after four rather intense years. There comes a point when having met the goals that informed the philosophy of the editorial process, new ideas, approaches and methodologies are required to sustain the journal on its intellectual trajectory. The social sciences, and certainly international relations, were increasingly embracing post-structuralist and post-positivist accounts of conflict, and submissions to the journal were increasingly reflecting this intellectual trend. While, as Co-Editors, we (Alice and Clive) realised the value of such approaches, we knew that such frameworks lay beyond our interest (and indeed competence) while, at the same time, realising the journal had to become even more eclectic in its conceptual embrace. To this end, we looked to hand over the reins of the journal to a new, younger generation of scholars who, while valuing to the strength of the positivist tradition on which the journal was founded, looked to theoretical and methodological innovation in providing new perspectives on civil war and internecine conflict.

We were though happy to shepherd through the review process an increasingly diverse and exciting range of articles, including, for example, one on the impact on the great apes of conflict in the Virungas (Benz and Benz-Schwarzburg 2010), the first to really examine human–wildlife crossovers in civil wars in our journal. These remaining articles of our tenure largely appeared in the first couple of issues of 2010. Indeed, the combined issues one and two of 2010 represented a rich selection of articles on topics such as: spoilers in peace processes in Central Africa (Blaydes and De Maio 2010), British counterinsurgency operations in Helmand (Pritchard and Smith 2010), institutional design in peace processes (Theuerkauf 2010), and ethnic violence and local participation in post-war reconstruction in Lebanon (Mac Ginty and Hamieh 2010), along with two substantial review essays and ten book reviews. Demonstrating that while the journal had reflected developments in the War on Terror, it had not been led by that agenda. Instead, it had highlighted less studied conflicts and was excited to publish on newer research agendas in the field. After a period of very rapid growth, diversification of content and significant increase in submissions, as well as a real increase in the journal’s profile, we like to think that we were able to hand on a journal in good shape to the new editorial team in Birmingham, who could build upon our successes and take the journal to greater heights.

Looking back for this editorial reflection, it has been interesting to note that eight of the most read articles since the journal’s birth in 1998 were published during our editorship, and more than a third of the currently most cited articles in Civil Wars appeared in its pages during this era. By trying to respond to the opening of new areas of research and through the policy of making special issues part of the journal’s core business, it is not especially surprising that the foundations laid during that time engaged scholars seeking to publish research which was actively breaking new ground and adding to debates in exciting new ways. Being at the coal face of a field which was so dynamic was a highly stimulating experience, even if it did make finding equally expert peer reviewers something of a challenge at times. Reviewers, though, were frequently just as excited as we were by the new research coming through and were keen to encourage authors, whilst also offering constructive criticism – often coming from a place of genuine curiosity. This was a field where, while debates could sometimes be vociferous, there remained a genuine sense of shared endeavour in growing knowledge and opening new areas for research. As Civil Wars has gone from strength to strength since our editorship, we hope that this spirit that we both encountered and encouraged, in which people from diverse disciplinary, methodological and geographical specialisms could find a place where they could collectively examine the complex phenomenon of civil wars, holistically and in a spirit of mutual support, will continue.

Disclosure Statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James Worrall

James Worrall is Associate Professor in International Relations and Middle East Studies in the School of Politics & International Studies at the University of Leeds. The thematic focus of his work explores Western relations with the Arab World, Gulf Politics, Society and Security, Regional International Organisations, Counterinsurgency, Localised Order(s) in Civil Wars, Post Conflict Reconstruction (especially Security Sector Reform), as well as Regime Stability and Legitimacy in non-democratic states. He has published widely on these themes in journals such as International Migration Review, Third World Quarterly, Middle Eastern Studies, Small Wars & Insurgencies, Global Policy, and Studies in Conflict & Terrorism. He is Co-Editor of Civil Wars and was Assistant Editor of Civil Wars between 2006 and 2010.

Clive Jones

Clive Jones is Professor of Regional Security (Middle East) in the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University and Visiting Research Professor in the Department of Historical and Classical Studies, NTNU, Trondheim, Norway. His publications include The Clandestine Lives of Colonel David Smiley: Code Name ‘Grin’ (2019); with Yoel Guzansky, Fraternal Enemies: Israel and the Gulf Monarchies (2020); with Tore T. Petersen, eds., Israel’s Clandestine Diplomacies (2013); and Britain and the Yemen Civil War, 1962-65 (2010). He was Co-Editor (with Alice Hills) of Civil Wars between 2006 and 2010 and Assistant Editor between 1998 and 2005.