Why a Journal of Civil Wars?

The 1990s seem a long time ago: much has happened in global politics. So, when the current editors asked me to reflect on why I had founded the journal twenty-five years ago that question inspired quite some reflection. Why indeed? Why had it seemed purposeful to start such an endeavour? Why the considerable effort of creating a journal from scratch? And this in a period in which authors submitted hard copy drafts through the mail both from home and abroad.

To recall, the idea of a new journal had been planted with us at Leeds University by Frank Cass and his redoubtable editor, Randall Gray. I suspect that they were encouraged by John Gooch who after years of running the Journal of Strategic Studies wanted us in the International Studies group to find both identity and research purpose. At that time in the late 1990s, Mr Cass was still running one of London’s few family-owned publishing houses. He was something of a legend in the trade, having started his business selling law books from a wheelbarrow in the streets of the East End. Over many conversations in the Cass offices which were invariably piled high with books and papers, we discussed the shape of the world and what it looked like (at least to us). Our puzzle was why after the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Communist enemy, conflict and war seemed to be blooming and pretty much everywhere. We took this as a starting point – why did the world seem so ‘bloody’? (Gray 2007).

We agreed that war was the very stuff of international politics and unlikely to be tamed, but war appeared in the 1990s to have some novel features. Horrors of infinite variety abounded, mass rape, ethnic cleansing and genocide (however many had sought in the period of Rwanda to avoid that particular label). Wars were messy, intractable and primitive. All of this was encapsulated in Mary Kaldor’s pithy and memorable thesis of ‘New Wars’. Her powerful descriptions of a globalised world fuelling and exacerbating ethnic conflict, drawing in a multitude of actors certainly gave pause for thought and spawned both adherents and critics in equal numbers (Kaldor and Vashee 1997, Kaldor 1999). She provided us with one of our touchstones.

Yet for all the darkness described in her books and articles Kaldor was not a fatalistic cynic. She adopted a form of Cosmopolitan thought that shone some hope on what had come to be viewed as a decade of chaos and anxiety symbolised by both the debacle in Mogadishu in 1993 and the failure of military and political will at Srebrenica in 1995. Both examples were civil wars at their most brutal, showcasing the incompetence of the UN and the inability of the international community to prevent civil wars, while highlighting the failures of ‘safe’ havens which had in reality become cradles of death.

One question was whether the gloom could be lightened – perhaps – by efforts to change if not human nature than the framework in which peace may be achieved. In this respect, the 1990s could herald both the settlement ending official apartheid in South Africa and the end of one of the most intractable of conflicts – that of Northern Ireland. Indeed, after thirty years of killing and mayhem on that island across the water, and due in no small part to the efforts of the Americans, an uneasy peace was brokered under the Good Friday Agreement (MacGinty 2001). Even as Mr Cass and I pondered the nature of our new journal ‘Civil Wars’ and its sombre underpinnings there seemed to be some good news, perhaps some hope that we could return to a civil condition: that the internal affairs of a state could in some instances be regulated away from the merely barbarous and there could be a minimum standard of civility.

Our journal therefore, we decided, was to be a mix of understanding these uncivil wars but also a project to understand how such conflicts might be ended or ameliorated whilst appreciating that was much to learn from the Irish truce (Rogers 2000, Wolff 2002). Cognisant of our own limitations though and wary of grandeur we decided to endeavour to publish voices from and concerned with conflicts outside the usual purvey of many Western journals with Mr Cass insistent on a Middle Eastern angle, a task ably taken up by our Leeds colleague and Israel expert, Clive Jones (Jones and Pedahzur 2003).

All these beginnings took place against the backdrop of a Soviet Union defeated and to all intents and purposes dead. Whilst conflicts did break out in the post-Soviet space in contested places such as Nagorno-Karabakh, it appeared as if the Communist experiment had quite simply failed with surprisingly little resistance from the Kremlin. The gallant efforts of Gorbachev to reform a broken system had in fact hastened its demise and although we did not see it at the time (excited and beguiled as we were by the end of history thesis) had engendered ominous consequences. If we could not see this in the West others could and did: as the Chinese leader argued, ‘Gorbachev might have seemed clever but he was in fact – stupid’ (Cox 2021). This judgement of a catastrophic error to allow the Soviet project to fail was one endorsed by many ultra-nationalists in the new shrunken Russia but blithely ignored by most in the West.

While the journal did publish on issues such as the Chechen Wars, the unrest in the Southern Caucasus and the Tajik Civil War (Melvin 2001) – there was little that we (I mean me) recognised in terms of a possible war (state or civil) between Russia and Ukraine. Indeed, perhaps we simply wanted to believe that Ukraine after joining the NPT would remain docile in the shadow of its testy neighbour. This perhaps was the point, state on state war simply seemed unlikely. We agreed (and again I probably mean me) that we were more likely to be preoccupied by internal unrest and the struggles of post imperial politics in, for example, a former Yugoslavia or Central Asia (Lynch 2001) than state war.

The question of the unipolar moment and what role the US might play in all of this seemed clear. Liberal democracy, free elections and the expansion of projects such as NATO might, along with R2P, actually offer solutions to the business of war within states. The Kosovo War waged from a great height and with not a single combat fatality for NATO seemed to be the ‘model’ for both ‘saving strangers in danger’, removing unsavoury leaders and respecting the provenance of the Revolution in Military Affairs ensuring that the US remained unchallenged. Perhaps so. But what contributions to our new journal did highlight were the complexities of what happened after the bombing stopped (Taylor 2002). The enduring appeal of some of our early pieces is testament to an appetite to understand the human and inhuman faces of conflict: greed, mayhem, death and threaded through, courage and compassion.

As usual, any illusion of omnipotent power proved to be false. 9/11 transformed some of our calculations about the nature of war. Questions abounded. How had jihadists managed to attack in spectacular fashion the world’s greatest military power? What regions had given succour to these new terrorist groups? Where had this type of religious extremism originated? Did we understand the global currents of discontent with the Liberal Order? Our journal, even before the assault on the US, had taken the idea and practice of religious sentiment in global and local politics seriously (Fox 2000). This in a period when studies or ideas of religious sentiment in International Relations theory were resoundingly absent. That particular deficiency was ended by 9/11, and there was a welcome embrace of a new found sensibility in scholarship towards religious impulse and ideology. The very nature of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq highlighted that religion mattered and mattered a great deal.

One of the many intriguing features of the Iraq War was not simply the failure to understand that country and its complexities but the wanton blindness over the shape of regional forces and actors. In retrospect, we perhaps should have entitled our journal ‘Proxy Wars’. We had understood the shape of the Cold War and great power manipulation of proxies in say Angola or in the Horn of Africa, let alone in Central and Latin America but along with so many others the serious and influential meddling of an Iran in Iraq seemed to be of little consequence to those planning a war in the country. This even as many experienced voices warned of the perils of intervention, the many pitfalls of occupation and the need to comprehend the complex tribal politics of Iraq.

A civil war swiftly and surely followed the Western invasion and occupation. While much ink has now been shed over the failures of the mission – the obvious point was that beneath the initial shock and awe lurked an emergent and deadly civil war in which groups, gangs and men and women took sides. Much was known about the people in Iraq or Afghanistan, and in the case of the latter its deeply religious and conservative culture but this did not translate into the making of strategy (Schmidinger 2009).

Every ‘small war’ and this is a troublesome label (Barkawi 2004) but bear with me. So every small war in the post 1945 era was proclaimed a battle for the hearts and minds of the people. This was ostensibly at the core of strategy in a Malaya, a Kenya and a Cyprus – the list is long. The famous men of COIN – General Templer, the controversial Frank Kitson and then David Petraeus knew that the people had to be ‘won over’ no matter how dubious and counterproductive the means. Commanders understood, at least in theory that a small war was a battle for hearts and minds: yet many accounts of these conflicts seem strangely unpeopled. That human dimension was very much what we had in mind for the journal: somehow any study of war of whatever hue must include an understanding of the people: those usually on the receiving end of violence (Bakonyi and De Guevara 2009).

This brings us to the vexed questions of the civilians caught up in every war, the women and the children, the elderly, the infirm – we wanted to discuss what these civil wars perpetrated for the innocent. Here I was indebted to many fine scholars who permitted us to publish their important work (Aning 1998, Mills and Norton 2002) I note too that many scholars wondered about any claim that civilians were dying in greater numbers than ever before. Bodies, numbers and counting the dead matter and again what I believe the journal did and still does brilliantly is to enable scholars to question the established orthodoxies of the costs of conflict (Newman 2009) but also alert us to the blood, sacrifice and bedlam of war. And in all of this we wanted to note just how intimate a civil war could be: how close, how personal the killing may be, neighbours and families divided and destroyed. It has been fashionable over the last two decades or so to talk of Remote Warfare, Vicarious Warfare and Virtual Wars: how technology would do the killing for us. Yet, even as drones hover over targets, precision weaponry avoids the innocent and stand-off weapons prevail, a civil war still seems particularly personal. I wonder what Andrew Mumford (a friend of this journal, Mumford 2005) may think of my musing that a civil war is inherently intimate, and a proxy war is not.

The years in which new editors and their teams (Hills and Jones 2006) took up the editorship of the journal have passed quickly and with a dizzying array of conflicts across the globe from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through many conflicts that came after the Arab Spring. Myriad battles, terrorism and now war in Ukraine litter the global landscape. The work of the journal continues to be important and relevant and I say this in the summer of 2023 as we ponder if another civil war will break out in Russia. I know that the editorial teams remain as grateful as I am to the authors, the reviewers, the friends and the critics of the journal.

Not surprised at all – it’s just gratifying that we got it right – but not exactly by design!

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Notes on contributors

Caroline Kennedy-Pipe

Caroline Kennedy-Pipe is Professor of International Security and International Relations at Loughborough University, UK. She works on issues of contemporary war and has published on the Cold War, Russia and the conflict in Northern Ireland.