The Enduring Influence of The Logic of Violence in Civil War

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Notes

1. According to google scholar, Logic has been cited at least 400 times annually for the last 10 years for a total of 6078 times at the time of this writing.

2. See Petersen’s (2001) Resistance and Rebellion: Lessons from Eastern Europe, Wood’s (2003) Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador, Wilkinson’s (2004) Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India, Weinstein’s (2007) Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence, and Straus’ (2008) The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda.

3. Irregular civil wars are also referred to as guerrilla or asymmetric warfare, in which a weaker group of insurgents employs unconventional tactics so as to not confront state forces head-on.

4. There are too many works to cite here but some important books in the ‘second wave’ of this literature include: Fujii’s (2009) Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda, Mampilly’s (2011) Rebel Rulers: Insurgent Governance and Civilian Life During War, Christia’s (2012) Alliance Formation in Civil Wars, Staniland’s (2014) Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse, Arjona’s (2016) Rebelocracy: Social Order in the Colombian Civil War, Daly’s (2016) Organized Violence after Civil War: The Geography of Recruitment in Latin America, Cohen’s (2016) Rape During Civil War, Balcells’ (2017) Rivalry and Revenge: The Politics of Violence During Civil War, and Steele’s (2017) Democracy and Displacement in Colombia’s Civil War.

5. He compiled an extensive bibliography of 46 separate conflicts, dating from the Peloponnesian Wars (431–404 BCE) all the way to Afghanistan (1979–2001).

6. Fragmented sovereignty is when two or more groups exercise limited control over the same territory, while segmented refers to when two or more groups maintain full control over distinct territories (pp. 87–89).

7. That armed groups and state security forces have a hard time knowing who their supporters and enemies are within the territory they control.

8. Put simply, civilian collaboration with an armed group is determined by the armed group’s degree of territorial control: more control means more collaboration and vice versa.

9. Although the theory may seem complicated, undergraduate students find it surprisingly intuitive. For those interested in teaching it, Mosinger’s (2019) classroom simulation is extremely helpful in getting students to internalise the logics and behaviours of each of the different actors.

10. Kalyvas (2001) also rejects the opposite extreme, particularly prominent at the time, that some ‘new’ civil wars were all about ‘greed’. See Collier and Hoeffler (2004) for a discussion of the greed versus grievance paradigm and Kaldor (2012) for a discussion of new versus old wars.

11. Along with early work by Wood (2003) and Petersen (2001), Logic has spawned an entire sub-field which focuses on civilian behaviours, which range from joining or supporting armed groups to directly resisting them (see Weinstein and Humphreys 2008, Parkinson 2013, Viterna 2013, Arjona 2016, 2017, Shesterinina 2016, Tezcür 2016, Kaplan 2017, Steele 2017, Krause 2018; et al).

12. Colombia’s ongoing civil war being the exception.

13. See Arias (2013), Moncada (2013), Durán-Martínez (2015), and Lessing (2015) for examples of early applications of Kalyvas’ work to the topic of organised crime.

14. A large and growing body of work has employed this concept (Skarbek 2014, Arias 2017, Barnes 2017, 2022, Lessing and Denyer Willis 2019, Lessing 2020, Magaloni et al. 2020, Trejo and Ley 2020, Córdova 2022, Moncada 2022).

15. Interview with former gang leader on 9/9/2013. For a description of the fieldwork and ethics of this research, see the supplemental appendix to Barnes (2022).

16. The proliferation of armed groups in more recent civil wars may manifest some of these same dynamics. In this respect, Kalyvas (2012) usefully relaxes the assumption of dyadic conflict in the control-collaboration model in a subsequent article. In addition, Staniland (2012, 2017) has usefully shown that civil wars are not always all-out battles for territorial superiority but also often exhibit a variety of more collaborative relationships between states and armed groups even in the midst conflict.

17. For further discussion of these overlaps and distinctions, see Arias (2006), Lessing (2015), Schedler (2015), Barnes (2017), and Correa-Cabrera (2017). For a similar conceptual debate concerning terrorism, see Makarenko (2004), Flanigan (2012), Phillips (2018), and Teiner (2020).