Civil Wars: Towards an Evolution of a Field, 2010-2016

During my time as Editor and then (with Asaf Siniver) Co-Editor of Civil Wars (from 2010–2013 at the University of Birmingham and from 2013–2016 at the University of Leeds), and indeed since then, the study of intrastate armed conflict, broadly defined, has become ever more rigorous, innovative and popular amongst researchers and students. Many researchers and students engage with this area of scholarship from a personal background in – for example – Security Studies, Political Science and International Relations, but it has emerged as a distinct, multidisciplinary subject area in its own right that is in many respects now independent of its wider disciplinary ‘homes’. Nevertheless, the different ontological, epistemological and methodological assumptions and practices found in Civil War Studies – in terms of what the key objects of research in civil wars should be, how reliable knowledge in this area is produced, and how data should be gathered and analysed – also represent boundaries between scholars working in this area. The question therefore remains open as to whether Civil War Studies will continue to evolve into a coherent community of scholarship constituting a distinct ‘field’, or whether it is better characterised as multiple, separate sub-groups defined by narrower and sometimes exclusive approaches.

The evolving field has been marked by a number of key debates and epistemic turns, all reflected in the pages of Civil Wars and other leading publications. The shift to empiricism and quantitative approaches, which began in earnest in the 1990s, represented a very important driver in the growing popularity and policy impact of Civil War Studies. The cross-national research within this broad approach has produced some of the most enduring theoretical work which has passed the test of time, on topics such as the relevance of identity for intrastate armed conflict (for example, Ellingsen 2000, Fearon and Laitin 2000, 2003, Bercovitch and DeRouen 2005), rationalist economic motivations (Collier and Hoeffler 1998, 2000/03), the duration of civil wars (Fearon 2004, DeRouen and Jacob 2008, Mukherjee 2014), population size and demographic factors (Brunborg and Urdal 2005, Urdal 2006, Brückner 2010, Sirin 2011) environmental degradation including climate change (Homer-Dixon 1994, 1999, Hauge and Ellingsen 1998, Ide 2016), the links between forced migration and conflict (Salehyan and Gledtisch 2006, Melander and Öberg 2007, Rüegger 2019), spatial patterns in the occurrence of violence (Buhaug and Gates 2002, Kalyvas 2006, Weidmann and Zürcher 2013), democratisation and political transition (Hegre 2001, Cederman et al. 2010, Goldstone et al. 2010, Gurses and Mason 2010, Gleditsch and Hegre 2014), economic inequalities (Djankov and Reynal-Querol 2010, Cederman et al. 2011, Langer and Stewart 2014, Rudolfsen 2017), statebuilding (Newman 2014), and natural resources (Reuveny and Maxwell 2001, Ross 2004, Ron 2005, Sobek and Thies 2015), amongst many other topics.

This research has established some of the key findings on, for example, the types of societies which are more likely to experience serious intrastate armed conflict focusing in particular upon weak state capacity; poverty and underdevelopment; vertical, horizontal and spatial inequalities; group domination of power; conflict-prone neighbours; ethnicity, identity and societal heterogeneity, especially in the context of existing inter-communal tensions; political transition and anocracy; lootable resources; environmental stresses; and migration, including protracted refugee situations. In terms of secondary factors, rapid but uneven economic development, high levels of youth unemployment, demographic pressures (such as population increases, youth bulges, and male youth bulges), gender discrimination, newly independent states, and international intervention have all received a great deal of attention.

This empirical research has also generated some of the defining theoretical debates and findings, such as the distinction between ‘motivations’ and ‘opportunity’ in rebel activity, absolute and relative deprivation grievances as conflict drivers and the balance between societal (social, economic, political) and individual factors (such as opportunity costs and the collective action problem) in understanding societal instability. Of course, these positivist, cross-national approaches which dominate the field are not without their dissenters, and in particular from critical approaches (which challenge the idea of objective, ‘scientific’ knowledge), area studies (which challenges the lack of local expertise and engagement in some mainstream approaches), and anthropological approaches (which challenge the absence of cultural, religious and spiritual insights). Thus, even though scholars may share some research questions and subjects, they are often defined – and separated – by their methodological approaches.

A further component in the evolution of Civil War Studies is the promise of multi- and inter-disciplinarity. Although many students of this field assume that International Relations and Political Science are the natural ‘home’ of the subject, a range of disciplinary approaches are now widely engaged with civil wars and their contributions celebrated (Newman and DeRouen 2014). For example, multidisciplinary peace studies highlights the value and sometimes limitations of normative analysis, the focus on the underlying ‘structural’ sources of conflict including social deprivation and injustice and implications for conflict prevention. Political Science has contributed to an empirical, ‘scientific’ emphasis on material, measurable factors, deepening understanding of causality and the value of cross-national approaches and generalisable conclusions. Sociological approaches have brought insights from a focus on the broader, societal dimensions of conflict, the social/economic causes and consequences of conflict, and have explored the role of conflict in the evolution of societies (Malešević and Dochartaigh 2014). Historical studies of civil war bring essential insights from historical cases, identifying broad historical themes and descriptive narratives. Anthropology brings an emphasis upon uniqueness, insights from deep, in-country analysis, and cultural aspects including rituals (Richards 2005, 2014). Critical approaches – resisting ‘simplistic’ categorisations and definitions and sceptical of ‘external’ assumptions – emphasise local experience and knowledge, and remind us of the limitations of positivist ‘scientific’ approaches in understanding intrastate armed conflict (Jackson 2014).

The flourishing of new approaches to understanding the causes, nature and dynamics of intrastate conflicts, energised by multi-disciplinary perspectives, has also driven methodological innovation in recent decades. For example, spatial analysis of the micro-dynamics of conflict, the use of social media data, and the use of high-definition satellite remote sensing, amongst others, bring fresh insights. A welcome consequence of this innovation is a better appreciation of the complexity and context-specific nature of intrastate armed conflict, and a shift away from parsimonious, explanatory research which privileged linear causal models and often dominated debates in the 1990s and 2000s.

The evolution of civil war studies has been marked, and invigorated, by a number of debates over the last decade, and Civil Wars has been at the heart of these. Although these have sometimes been quite divisive, they have brought new insights and new forms of engagement, and they have served to hone analytical approaches and methodological sophistication. Amongst these, the impact of climate change upon intrastate armed conflict has attracted a huge amount of attention, exploring whether – and how – climate change is a direct or underlying source of violent conflict, in conjunction with other factors (Homer-Dixon 1994, 1999, Devitt and Tol 2012, Buhaug and Seter 2014, Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change 2014, Kelley et al. 2015, Theisen 2017, Mach et al. 2019).

There has been a push back against some of the bolder claims about climate change as a direct cause of intrastate armed conflict, as researchers make the case that the causal relationship – if any – is highly contingent, indirect, and meaningful only alongside other conflict drivers (Salehyan 2008, Buhaug 2010, Selby and Hoffmann 2014, Selby et al. 2017). In particular, weak state capacity, economic (in particular horizontal) inequalities, existing inter-communal tensions, anocracy or group domination of political power, and demographic pressures, amongst others, seem to be key to understanding why and how climate change increases the risk of violence. This controversy has highlighted the methodological limitations of empirical conflict analysis – especially those approaches which aim for precise generalisable conclusions – but it has also encouraged more nuanced analysis which better captures the complexity and context-linked nature of intrastate armed conflict.

A further relatively recent debate which has been productive in this respect is that of ‘rebel governance’, which explores the activities of rebel organisations in the territories in which they have some level of control or influence, including the provision of public goods, the establishment of institutions, and thus the projection of forms of governance (Arjona et al. 2015, Arjona 2016, Kubota 2017, Terpstra and Frerks 2017, Sosnowski 2018, Waterman and Worrall 2020, van Baalen 2021, Albert 2022, Newman et al. 2023). This topic has opened up new vistas of enquiry which bring sociological, anthropological and comparative perspectives into the study of intrastate conflict, offering critical insights into the existence of institutions beyond the state and into everyday life in times of conflict. Other emerging areas of research offer promise in different ways, including the effect of compounding conflict drivers (for example Homer-Dixon et al. 2016), the inter-relationship between civil wars and other phenomena such as international order, and the decoloniality agenda as it relates to Civil War Studies.

These and other themes informed my own work during my time as editor of Civil Wars, and reading countless submissions and engaging with authors – the rewards of journal work – certainly stimulated and continue to influence my own thinking as I seek to make my own contributions to debates. During that time, I published one monograph and one major edited collection, amongst other smaller projects in the civil wars field. The monograph, Understanding Civil Wars: Continuity and Change in Intrastate Conflict (Newman 2014) sought to engage in a number of key debates about the evolving nature of intrastate armed conflict. This book was sceptical of the ‘new wars’ concept, instead pointing to the historical continuities which can be found in many of the civil wars of the 20^th and 21^st Centuries, and in particular the theme of statebuilding. The co-edited collection – the Routledge Handbook of Civil Wars (Newman and DeRouen 2014) – provided a comprehensive survey of the key issues and debates in the civil wars field and was designed to appeal to researchers and students globally. This 30-chapter volume was inclusive in scope, representing positivist quantitative scholars as well as critical analysts, cross-national political scientists, alongside anthropologists and sociologists, and contributions drawing upon traditional forms of data, as well as more experimental sources, such as social media data. In my own work and as an editor of Civil Wars, I was – and continue to be – attracted to debates which embrace a historical perspective, which challenge the distinction between empirical and critical research, and which promote collaboration amongst scholars using different methodological approaches.

The civil war and intrastate armed conflict field is thriving in part as a result of a tragic fact: the upsurge in violence globally since around 2011. The celebrated historical decline in civil war (Human Security Centre 2005, Goldstein 2012) proved to be quite short-lived. It is all the more important that the field continues to embrace methodological innovation and new lines of enquiry in order to deepen our understanding of the causes and nature of intrastate armed conflict and to offer policy-relevant implications for preventing violence and building peace. The contribution of Civil Wars as a journal, which goes from strength to strength, remains at the heart of this agenda.

Disclosure Statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Edward Newman

Edward Newman is Professor of International Security in the School of Politics and International Studies at the University of Leeds, UK. His work explores international order, intrastate armed conflict, theoretical security debates, and international intervention. He is a former Editor and Co-Editor of Civil Wars, Co-Editor of the European Journal of International Security, a founding Executive Editor of the International Relations of the Asia Pacific, and founding Co-Editor of the Routledge Studies in Civil Wars and Intra-State Conflict book series.