Civil Wars and Civil Wars 2017–2021: A Reflection

By the time we took over Civil Wars in 2017, the journal was (as it continues to be) a highly respected and well-established curator and shaper of scholarly and policy debates on intra-state conflict. Having inherited a journal in excellent shape from our predecessors Edward Newman and Asaf Siniver, our overriding concern – as is the case for most new editors, (we suspect!) was to maintain the quality and reputation of the publication. Assuming we could manage that, we also hoped to further grow the journal and its contributions across a number of areas to reflect what we saw as exciting and important trends emerging in the field.

The first trend we sought to explore was methodology and methods. As social scientists, we are often encouraged to present our approach to data collection and analysis as ‘perfect’. Grant applications and review committees (often) expect us to carefully delineate every stage of the research process, before it has commenced. In publications, we present our methodology post-hoc, as if everything went completely to plan, just as envisaged at inception. And for UK-based academics, we are all under pressure to demonstrate the ‘rigour’ of our research design as part of the Research Excellence Framework (REF).

There are solid reasons for some of this. Grant reviewers need to feel reasonably confident that funds (often drawn from the public purse) will be spent wisely, and that a project has a good chance of delivering meaningful and impactful results. Moreover, authors who include too much candour around methodological missteps in their manuscripts risk pushback from reviewers – though as Co-Editors, we almost always found reviewer feedback to be constructive, encouraging, and thoughtful. Ultimately, though, research projects rarely go as planned and qualitative, fieldwork-based research can be particularly unpredictable and ‘messy’. With many of the world’s conflicts located in the Global South, researchers in our field must also contend with complex and challenging questions on knowledge production and power dynamics, as well as risk and safety concerns.

The 2010s saw Peace and Conflict scholars become increasingly willing to openly reflect on these questions, and on their implications for all of our research. We recall in particular, the exciting and critical conversations started by Roger Mac Ginty, Tanja Müller, Bertrand Taithe, and Celia Russell on the knowledge politics of UN peacekeeping data during a 2014–2017 project they co-led (HCRI 2014), but would also point to the work of Berit Bliesemann de Guevara (2014, 2017), Lisa Smirl (2015), Florian Kühn (2016), Severine Autesserre (2014), Mark Duffield (2010), Annika Björkdahl, Oliver Richmond, Stefanie Kappler (Richmond et al. 2015), and Larissa Fast (2017), among many others. These discussions were not confined to academic circles – see, for example, Juliano Fiori et al’s important 2016 study of how humanitarian organisations conceptualise ‘success’ (Fiori, 2016). A series of scandals in the world of practice in recent years – from Oxfam and Save the Children, to the UN in Haiti – nonetheless highlights how far many organisations have still to go in addressing – often racialised and gendered – power asymmetries and reprehensible practices within their own ranks.

We felt that Civil Wars was an ideal venue to host and progress these discussions given the journal’s longstanding commitment to challenging conceptual and empirical orthodoxies, and its welcoming of submissions from all methodological perspectives. We were delighted to publish a number of excellent studies and a series of key Special Issues on these themes during our tenure. The latter included an influential exploration of ‘research brokers’ in conflict zones, guest edited by Eriksson Baaz and Mats Utas (2019) which raised a number of critical questions on transferred risk and insecurity, but also emphasised the complex power relationships that exist ‘in the field’, which cannot always be reduced to binaries (see also Bliesemann de Guevara et al. 2020). We also hosted an innovative collection of studies of ‘the Politics of Comparing Armed Conflicts’, guest edited by Bruno Charbonneau and Adam Sandor (2019), which challenges us to rethink how and why we use the comparisons and analogies we do in our work.

Three years into our editorship, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. While the long-term impact of this deadly virus remains to be seen, what is clear is that it has intersected with, and exacerbated, many existing inequities across the globe. We saw this ourselves during the final 18 months of our tenure as article submissions to the journal from female scholars – disproportionately impacted by caring responsibilities during national lockdowns (Mahdawi 2021) – dropped dramatically. One potential ‘positive’ from the pandemic, however, has been the enforced pausing of fieldwork, and in-person conferences. This has, at the very least, precipitated discussion and reflection in many quarters on the wider politics of knowledge production in Peace and Conflict Studies, where mobility and ‘being there’ has often been taken for granted by many scholars based in the North (Dunia et al. 2023). The speed at which in-person-only conferences have resumed, however – with all of the associated inequalities of access and visa regimes, suggests that the ‘hybrid’ world of Covid-19 may not be a lasting one.

The study and analysis of ‘rebel governance’ represents a second area of growth and focus in the journal in recent years, as Edward Newman’s reflections in this issue also note.¹ The drivers and motivations of insurgents has been a longstanding debate within the field, as has discussion on the changing nature of contemporary civil wars (see Caroline Kennedy-Pipe’s (2023) contribution to this Special Issue, as well as Reno and Matisek 2018). How and why some rebels ‘rule’ in the territories they hold, however, has been a more neglected set of questions until the 2010s, at least at the level of theory-building and cross-continental comparison. Early on in our tenure, we were pleased to publish a Special Issue on the theme of Armed Groups and Multi-Layered Governance, guest edited by, and featuring, some of the key shapers of the nascent ‘rebel governance’ school (Kasfir et al. 2017). Alongside Georg Frerks and Niels Terpstra, the guest editorial team included Nelson Kasfir, whose 2015 co-edited volume on the theme with Ana Arjona and Zachariah Mampilly has become a seminal contribution, alongside the 2016 and 2011 monographs (respectively) of Arjona and Mampilly themselves (Arjona, 2016, Mampilly, 2011). Further contributions to the debate have been made in Civil Wars by, inter alia Israelsen (2018 – on Thailand and Myanmar), Sosnowski (2018 – Syria), Raineri and Martini (2017 – the Maghreb), Ross (2019 – Mexico), and Dudek (2021 – Sierra Leone).

Taking rebel governance and legitimation strategies seriously – as this literature does – proved itself to be particularly salient in our final year as co-editors. The August 2021 capturing of Kabul, and the collapse of the Afghan government, by the Taliban, surprised and horrified many analysts, who struggled to understand how a group with such a brutal reputation could enjoy any support from the Afghan citizenry. The rebel governance scholarship – including pieces in Civil Wars itself (Dirkx 2017, Malejacq and Sandor 2020, Sanaullah 2021) – helps us to better understand how some rebels deploy governance strategies to both build legitimacy among some local populations and to contrast their own approaches with those of what may be viewed as a neglectful, abusive, or exploitative state.

The transformation of the Taliban from rebels to rulers in the 2020s occurred in reverse in Ethiopia during the same period, with the once dominant party within the country’s ruling coalition – the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) – being pushed out of office in 2018 (Fisher and Meressa 2019) and eventually declared a terrorist organisation by the Ethiopian legislature in May 2021. The terrible 2020–2022 conflict fought between the TPLF and its allies and the Ethiopian Federal Government has yet to be comprehensively analysed by scholars or international bodies. The violence brought home once again how rapidly and, often, unexpectedly, peace can give way to war. It also underlined how even in an age of social networks and instantaneous connectivity, those who hold power can still impose information blackouts in conflict theatres, destroying citizens’ livelihoods, and confounding the work of a whole range of actors from humanitarian bodies to journalists and academics, the latter two enabling – in the case of Ethiopia – human rights abuses to take place with impunity (AccessNow 2023).

The third major trend we sought to explore was the blurring of analytical categories – within both practice and research – of peace and conflict. In some ways this has always existed within more practical approaches of those engaged at the end of civil wars and the beginning of peace, with difficult questions surrounding continuing forms of violence, structures that may lead to conflict, and also outcomes of peace processes and conflicts themselves.

A key element of this continuation relates to the afterlives of underlying structural conditions like grey economies that perpetuate conflict and prevent longer-term peace processes. A particularly under-researched theme here is the continuation of economic dynamics that perpetuate conflict, and these economic themes were explored in a notable Special Issue on Economies of Peace: Economy Formation Processes in Conflict-Affected Societies (Distler et al. 2018). A critical conclusion from this collection is that a wide range of different actors have economic interests in maintaining structures that may perpetrate conflict.

Amongst the several sub-themes that blur the boundaries between analytical categories is the excellent research published by the journal on civil wars, peace and governance, including another notable Special Issue on Coups D’Etat (Day et al. 2020) where the authors explore the vexed issue of civil-military relations. This special issue contained a wide range of authors who discussed issues as diverse as corruption (Bareebe 2020), professionalisation and politicisation (Khisa 2020) and elite bargains (Berg 2020). The nature of security services and their relationship to positive and negative aspects of civilian authority including corruption and politicisation, was the focus of a wide range of articles published during our tenure. These also included an array of geographical foci including gender in frozen conflicts (Cárdenas 2019) and the role of predators undermining peace processes in Pakistan (Farooq et al. 2020).

By way of conclusion, we wish to underline the degree to which our editorship was very much a group effort. Civil Wars is blessed with a very active and engaged Editorial Board, which has continued to expand over the years and now includes colleagues based across five continents. Not only have the journal’s Board members always been excellent sounding boards for special issue proposals and reliable peer reviewers for manuscripts, they have also played a very important role as authors and guest editors themselves – shaping the discipline and the journal’s continued contribution.

Two further developments probably merit further mention: firstly, as editors we are both aware of a historical gender imbalance within our subject area, so we deliberately followed a ‘no all-male issue’ policy to try and ensure better balance. In the event, research has developed in a way that makes it far more inclusive and, related to the point about blurring of lines above, the journal shifted to include more critical approaches, and this brought in some really excellent scholars across all groups. Secondly, we were also aware that non-European or US voices were rarely heard as authors, and yet, as editors, we received a number of applications from Africa and Asia in particular. Many of these contained excellent research but were not well-written or presented according to normal academic conventions, or in the style of the journal. As a response to this we brought on our excellent Deputy Editor, Sukanya Podder, to lead on work with some of the authors to coach them in writing for a journal like Civil Wars. Our view has always been that our subject benefits from a plurality of voices.

We were also able to rely on the support and guidance of our fantastic Assistant Editors, Tom Jervis and Rob Skinner. Last but not least, James Worrall and Alex Waterman were an exemplary book reviews team, curating many thoughtful pieces and launching an exciting new series called ‘Reimagining the Field’ (Waterman and Worrall 2020). We were delighted to hand over the reins to James and Alex and wish them all the very best as they take the journal to even greater heights!

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jonathan Fisher

Jonathan Fisher is Professor of Global Security at the University of Birmingham. He works on the intersections between (in)security and authoritarianism and has an empirical focus on Africa. Recent monographs include East Africa after Liberation: Conflict, Security and the State since the 1980s (2020) and (with Nina Wilén) African Peacekeeping (2022).

Paul Jackson

Paul Jackson is Professor of African Politics at the University of Birmingham. He works on the political economy of security, particularly security and governance and security sector reform. He is the author of several books and articles, and was a member of the UK Government REF panel on Development and Anthropology. He is currently a member of the UN Committee of Experts on Public Administration where his responsibility includes oversight of governance and security within SDG16.

Notes

1. The current Co-Editors are both longstanding scholars of rebel governance.