Civil Wars at 25: Introduction to the Silver Anniversary Special Issue

Reaching a milestone, such as a quarter of a century, offers the chance to pause and reflect on what has been achieved, but also to celebrate those achievements. It seemed to us that one of the best ways to do that was to produce a Special Issue which examined the evolution of the field of study and Civil Wars’ place in that field.

The journal was founded at the University of Leeds in 1998, very much at the start of the first real wave of identifiable scholarship on civil wars, marking the emergence of something which started to look like a field of study in its own right. One only has to think of works of that era, such as Mary Kaldor’s New and Old Wars: Organised Violence in a Global Era (1999); Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler’s Greed and Grievance in Civil War (2000); Mark Duffield’s Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security (2001); Mary Anderson’s, Do No Harm: How Aid Can Support Peace – Or War (1999); Mats Berdal and David Malone’s Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars (2000), David Keen’s, ‘The Economic Functions of Violence in Civil Wars,’ (1998) and Frances Stewart and Valpy Fitzgerald’s War and Underdevelopment (2000), to name just a few, to see that a clear field of study was beginning to emerge at that time. While these works were, of course, blurry and partial, they nonetheless reflected a wider, serious and sustained, attempt to delve deeper into the causes and effects of civil wars in a profound manner using a range of different concepts and methods to try to find patterns and, in turn, affect policy decisions and practices.

This is not of course to suggest that there was no scholarship on these issues before this time; the works of Ted Gurr, Theda Skocpol and Charles Tilly, among many others, both predate and have significantly informed our field. It is more to recognise the birth of a new field with roots in other disciplines and traditions which began to grow in earnest during this period, in response to the considerable increase in civil wars at the end of the Cold War, and especially the ways in which they captured the news agenda and became significantly more important to policymakers. As such, the journal has very much grown up alongside the field of study that it represents and many of the debates and evolutions of the field have played out across its pages.

So, on this the journal’s Silver Anniversary, it seemed appropriate to reflect, take stock and additionally to think about the future of Civil War Studies which has grown, at times seemingly exponentially, from its first real flourishing in the late 1990s to the complex field it is today, replete with its own niches and emerging sub-disciplines, new methods, epistemologies and conceptual underpinnings. There has been a great deal achieved in two and a half decades. We have significantly improved our understanding of the complexities of intra-state conflict, while at the same time, having a clearer idea of just how much there is left for us to learn. The journal has played a role in these wider processes and will continue to do so.

Civil Wars’ mission is, as outlined in our aims and scope, ‘to publish original scholarship on all aspects of intrastate conflict, including its causes and nature, and the factors which help to explain its onset, duration, intensity, termination and recurrence’. It also publishes work which explores the epistemology of scholarship on intra-state conflict and contributes to debates about the politics, sociology and economics of civil wars, and to the significance of intrastate conflict for international relations. The mission statement goes on to say that: ‘the journal has a broad intellectual remit designed to be multidisciplinary and open to a range of different academic methodologies and interests. It welcomes work on specific armed conflicts and micro-analysis, on broad patterns of civil wars, and on historical perspectives, as well as contemporary challenges. It also seeks to explore the policy implications of conflict analysis, especially as it relates to international security, conflict prevention and resolution, intervention and peacebuilding’.

Here in this rich and diverse 25th Anniversary Special Issue, we take the time to reflect on the growth of the field of Civil War Studies, understand where we are at present and look forward to the promise and pitfalls of future research on civil wars. In our eagerness to pursue new research and deepen our understanding, sometimes it is good to re-ask ourselves foundational questions, to take stock of where we came from and acknowledge some of the mistakes we have made along the way, in order to really challenge our epistemological, ontological and methodological assumptions and practices, and to celebrate the insights and hard work of so many people who have collectively made this such a rich field. We hope that Civil Wars’ 25th Anniversary Year, and this Anniversary Special Issue in particular, offers the opportunity to do just that.

Putting Together the Special Issue

Even before taking over the journal in January 2022, the journal’s anniversary was in our minds, and when going through the editorial handover we began to think in earnest about ways of celebrating the milestone through opening up a series of spaces to debate the past, present and future of the field of study. After the handover was completed, we began to reflect more fully on our intention to try to put together a 25th Anniversary Special Issue, what that would mean and what kinds of contributions we would like to see.

We wanted, as we put it in the call, to ‘pause and reflect on the state of the field, how it has evolved and to explore future trajectories and opportunities’. But we also wanted as part of this endeavour to locate the journal’s role in the positive development of the field and think about how it can contribute to the evolution and growth of the field in the future as well. All of this involved reflecting on what the field was and what the journal’s place in it was. So, we began to really reacquaint ourselves with what Civil Wars had published over the years and in particular began with the initial Editorial Statements of the previous editorial teams (Kennedy‐Pipe and Jones 1998, Hills and Jones 2006, Newman et al. 2010, Fisher and Jackson 2017). Some of this was part of the preparation for our writing own editorial vision (Worrall and Waterman 2022) but it was also specifically to help us shape the call for papers for the 25th Anniversary Special Issue.

We wanted very much for the Special Issue to be a lively, stimulating and forward-looking endeavour, basing some of our inspiration on our idea for the new ‘Reimagining the Field’ series which we had introduced as Reviews Editors in 2020, and also having written the first contribution (Waterman and Worrall 2020). This was designed to be a fully peer reviewed stock-taking of the current position of a key sub-field or emerging area of focus which also contained elements of original research and actively looked forward to suggest ways in which this area of study could focus and develop in the coming years, along with highlighting some of the pitfalls among the potential. In other words, something scholarly but accessible and above all useful for people thinking about connections and possibilities, as well as raising the profile of new and emerging research focuses. In thinking through our vision for the journal under our tenure as Editors and working up the call for articles for the Anniversary Special Issue, we saw considerable potential for synergies which would enable the Special Issue to be a productive way to encourage debate and reflection.

The call for papers, which was disseminated in mid-August 2022, was explicitly designed to go deeper into the discipline. We asked people not only to pause and reflect on the state of the field, how it has evolved and to explore future trajectories and opportunities, but also to specifically to think about:

the epistemology and ontology of the field, re-examining theoretical assumptions and frameworks, documenting the range of sub-fields which have emerged within the study of civil wars and to discuss the methodological challenges faced by both quantitative and qualitative approaches alike.

We suggested that the proposed contributions should fall under one or more of six main types, which were designed to push contributors away from producing the standard research article normally found in the journal and towards broader reflections on the field of study. The six suggested article types were:

• Big picture examinations of the evolution of the field and the journal’s place within these key developments.

• Examination of particular sub-fields or themes within the discipline, in terms of both their development and their future potential. Examples may include (but are not limited to): conflict drivers, localised/micro-dynamics, escalation/de-escalation, civil war recurrence, interventions, peace processes and conflict termination.

• Commentary articles reflecting on key contributions made by specific articles or groups of articles published in the journal over the past 25 years.

• Methodological challenges, including ethics and fieldwork dynamics which have emerged or changed over the years, and their implications.

• Engagements with the epistemological and ontological assumptions which underpin the field, broadly defined.

• Discussion of key case studies and their influence on the development of the field.

We hoped that the call for papers would produce articles which were a little shorter than our 8,000–10,000 norm and we suggested that authors should aim for 5,000–6,000 words. As you will later see, while on average, the articles in this Special Issue are a little shorter than usual people often had so many interesting things to say that we certainly were not going to unnecessarily restrict the size of the contributions.

The call also asked for contributions to the reviews section, requesting reviews of ‘classic’ books in our field which would ‘assess, the strengths, weaknesses and legacies of these works – and especially how they speak across North/South debates and experiences of political violence and civil war’. It seemed to us that there was real value in both identifying these ‘classics’ and really revisiting them systematically to assess their impact on the field of study and to examine their continuing relevance for the future. In other words, we were not looking for hagiographic summaries and the narration of triumphant pathways but thorough examinations of the ways knowledge and ideas influenced the field for good and for bad, and a proper reassessment of relevance in the context of today’s priorities.

As part of the process, we held some brainstorming sessions attempting to map out what our dream Special Issue would look like. Remarkably, looking back on our notes from those sessions it seems that we are much closer to the outline of that dream than we ever believed we would be. The Anniversary Special Issue is a diverse mixture of topics, methods, epistemologies and geographical diversity. Although, we would have liked to have had some more specifically centred pieces examining the ontological and epistemological challenges which have faced the field, articles with focus on post-conflict dynamics and legacies of civil wars, more contributions examining the impact of specific articles published in Civil Wars, and especially a couple more articles which looked at the role of certain cases in the shaping of the field – articles on the Congo, Sierra Leone/Liberia and South East Asia would have been especially welcome!

The response to our call for papers was impressive, although we had to decline many submissions which often more closely mirrored standard research articles without offering any reflection on the field and its future. While we received proposals from a diverse array of contributors from across the academic community, we only received a handful from the Global South and then sadly went on to lose some of those which were initially accepted for outline inclusion during the tight drafting and review process. This reflects the significant work that is still needed to at least mitigate deeper structural inequities and ensure better representation, a theme we return to in our concluding thoughts of this Special Issue.

From late October 2022, with the passing of the deadline for the call for papers, we began to sift through the submissions, trying to map out how the Special Issue might look and checking for quality. Gradually, we whittled down the submissions to a core and began to send out acceptance notes, often with suggestions for changes of direction or new inclusions to help them meet the objectives of the Special Issue more fully. We gave authors a deadline for full submission of articles of the 28 February 2023 and an open door to approach us with ideas, questions and clarifications during the writing process. This produced some very interesting dialogues as the articles developed and ideas were discussed, which benefitted both us and the authors and resulted in even better papers.

As we developed an idea of what the Special Issue was going to look like we returned to our call for papers and highlighted some of the areas which had been missed in the many submissions we received. From here we began to approach people who we thought would be able to fill those gaps, sometimes even pairing people together from the original submissions whose ideas overlapped. This has resulted in some exciting new research collaborations which no doubt will produce further work together in future! We tried to treat the process not as a fully structured endeavour but as an organic process which attempted to reach the goals outlined in the call as best as possible. The open nature of the call and us then drawing on our networks to recruit to fill specific gaps worked well and enabled us to achieve most of our initial objectives while also generating contributions which we had not initially expected, thus contributing to the textured richness and diversity to be found within these pages.

Our contributors signed up to a strict schedule in order for us to deliver the Special Issue within 10 months of the call for papers closing. Some were even still finalising data collection in June 2023 and frantically updating draft articles for final peer review. Speaking of which, we relied on the kindness, generosity and efficiency of our pre-booked peer reviewers who consistently turned around comments at pace enabling the articles to get through revisions and peer review in short order. As editors, we also engaged deeply in these processes, reviewing drafts and copyediting extensively, in most cases before submission for peer review, thus further speeding up the process. This approach was at times extremely labour-intensive, however it has not only resulted in timely publication but also very high-quality contributions indeed. Inevitably with such short timescales and life happening around us two of the articles which began the journey with us have sadly not made it into the final product. We hope to publish them both separately in future issues because they both contribute to these discussions. At times, we wondered if we had taken on too much and been too ambitious in trying to cohere this 25th Anniversary Special Issue in such a short time span but it seemed worth the effort at least, and we are very happy with the result.

What’s Inside?

We begin our Anniversary Issue with a section titled, Reflections. We asked all of the past editorial teams of Civil Wars to think back to their time as editors and to reflect on the nature of the field of study, the evolution of the field during their time in office and how the journal developed within that context under their leadership. This provides us with a good idea of the view from the coal-face of academic production over the journal’s history, which in turn enables us to see some of the key themes, trends and pressures which were shaping the field. Firstly, the journal’s Founding Editor, Caroline Kennedy-Pipe, offers an engaging overview of the reasons why, and the process through which, the journal was established a quarter of a century ago. Reflecting on the birth of the field of study and its travails in the early years, along with the journal’s attempts to open up new dimensions of study and shape the newly born discipline. This is followed by Clive Jones’ attempt, with Alice Hills as co-editor, from the mid-2000s until the end of the decade, to coalesce the field and to avoid the journal being dominated by the policy agendas of the Global War on Terror while still responding to the challenges it brought to a young discipline attempting to find its identity. Next Edward Newman, Editor between 2010 and 2016, examines the emergence of some sub-fields within our field, and the journal’s breadth and expansion over these years, while also reflecting on how editing the journal shaped his own research agenda during an era of significant expansion of the number of scholars working on issues connected with sub-state conflict. Finally, our immediate predecessors Jonathan Fisher and Paul Jackson provide a stimulating overview of their attempts to shape some of the emerging waves of the past 5 years around rebel governance, fieldwork ethics and the blurring of analytical categories. As well as highlighting their important agenda in helping improve the journal’s reach and accessibility.

In our next section, Journeys, we asked two leading scholars in the field to reflect on the evolution of Civil War Studies and their position in it, while also telling us about their own journeys through the field to their current prominent position, before finally offering some thoughts from their perspective on how civil wars is likely to develop as a discipline. In his contribution Paul Staniland conceptualises the field of research on civil wars in three generations. Growing up professionally within the second of these generations, he describes the evolution of the field and its diversification in methods, theory and practice. He also reflects on the lessons he has learned along the way, offering useful tips for those following his path into the field. Megan Stewart offers the perspective of a slightly later starter in the field, shaped intellectually by some of the major advances of earlier in the second generation and now influenced further by complex mixes of micro and macro, history and politics and quantitative and qualitative methods. She offers a stimulating discussion of the value of mixed methods and curiosity driven research in opening up new opportunities.

The mass of the articles in the Special Issue lie in our main section, Contributions, which contains 11 articles on a diverse range of topics. All of these pieces share the broad approach of detailed reflections on the literature and the state of the discipline in particular sub-fields of Civil War Studies. They also present new findings or make conceptual contributions and they all look forward through useful discussion of how particular topics could and/or should evolve over the coming years. In this sense they are all (naturally enough, to slightly varying degrees) combinations of review essays and standard research articles bringing together the best of both worlds to make greater contributions and meet the objectives of the Special Issue as a whole. Some articles make conceptual contributions, others reflect on methodological problems, others bring new data to bear, while others examine more policy related focuses, and they all reflect on the role of Civil Wars in the development of their particular areas of focus. Together, they offer an engaged, sometimes provocative, and in-depth overview of the state of many of the topic areas which make up Civil War Studies.

The articles in the main part of the Special Issue are loosely clustered into four themes. The first three articles examine some of the macro and micro patterns of civil wars, the second three examine issues around peace, mediation and humanitarian response to civil wars, the third cluster examines coverage of these conflicts, while the fourth and final cluster explores conceptualisations and micro-social processes within intra-state conflicts.

The first cluster begins with Fabio Andrés Díaz Pabón and Isabelle Duyvesteyn’s examination of the processes of escalation and de-escalation within civil wars, demonstrating the evolution of a key sub-field which has changed considerably in recent years. Taking some of these dynamics further Edoardo Corradi then explores the logics of patterns of alliance formation and disintegration of rebel groups within civil wars. As the field has grown, our understanding of the complexities of the combatants has been an increasingly important area of focus, and an especially dynamic one which has crucial micro, and in this piece, macro effects on the nature and duration of intra-state conflict. Rounding out the first cluster Jason Quinn and Matthew Hauenstein re-visit the findings of two articles which were published in Civil Wars, Roy Licklider’s piece in the journal’s very first issue, and Jeffrey Dixon’s follow up to that original piece a decade later. Using new statistical data they (re)examine findings on the global recurrence and termination of civil wars. This kind of careful follow-up work, for which the journal’s 25th Anniversary provided the perfect opportunity, reveals that, among other trends that, ‘the number of ongoing civil wars in the world is currently at an all time high’.

Given that the challenge of intra-state conflict remains so acute, research on ways to build peace, at all levels and in all ways remains of critical importance. Giulia Piccolino begins the second cluster of articles with a piece exploring the academic consensus around making peace and exploring the evolution of international norms around peace and intervention over the past 25 years. Dana Landau and Jacqui Cho then focus more specifically on key trends in both the research and practice of mediation, discussing the implications of research for practice, and vice versa. Of course, peace processes, mediation and peace research are only one part of successful responses to these challenges, the role of NGOs and humanitarian aid remains crucial to address the immediate human suffering caused by intra-state conflicts. Anisa Abetya, Esther Brito, John Sunday Ojo and Taha Alloosh examine the influence that these actors have on the dynamics of conflict, tracing some of the negative consequences of humanitarian aid and the work of the aid agencies. Here they question the ‘do no harm principle’ and the associated concept of neutrality. Taking stock of the debates that really began in the 1990s with the concept of ‘New Humanitarianism’, they make a case for a re-thinking of the precise nature of the ‘do no harm’ principle, arguing that in its current conception it risks escalation and increases suffering.

Our third cluster contains an important duo of articles examining the ways in which data and information of all kinds has shaped the ways in which we understand and have studied civil wars, and the important positive and negative consequences of this. This is an important theme within the Special Issue as a whole, and one which we wish to focus on more in the coming years. These two articles do this in very different ways which both highlight the crucial importance of different levels of analysis and different methodological approaches for understanding the field more holistically, more questioningly and thereby more comprehensively.

Andrew Shaver and his team offer an important contribution which explores the ways in which civil wars, and intra-state violence more broadly, are reported in the news media. Focusing specifically on analysing the gaps in coverage created by media-bias and how this then translates through into the key datasets which have shaped the quantitative study of civil wars and thereby having actually framed many of the key debates and directions of travel within the field. Highlighting some significant omissions, they suggest three key ways of reducing the problem by looking to alternative sources of data and overcoming issues of reporting by the media which can hide significant patterns of violence both temporally and spatially. This, of course, has significant methodological implications but it also forces us to think more broadly about the ways in which these conflicts are reported and how this shapes our understanding and perceptions both consciously and unconsciously. It also serves as a potent reminder of the constant challenge of remaining reflexive and engaged in our research designs to gather better, more reliable and detailed data.

In her contribution meanwhile, Juliana Tappe Ortiz examines, both quantitatively and qualitatively, the way in which the significant amount of scholarship on Colombia as a case has shaped the field of Civil War Studies. She identifies a range of key trends and highlights a number of issues which have emerged from, a sometimes, too intensive focus on this one case and attempts to extrapolate more broadly, while at the same time rightly highlighting the major insights, especially in particular sub-fields such as rebel governance and civilian agency, that research on Colombia has brought.

The final cluster takes us back into some key themes of the field in recent years, focusing on breaking down binaries, questioning and reconceptualising existing ways of looking at the complex phenomenon of intra-state conflict. They all also take us into the micro-social domain in important ways reminding us that the micro-turn of the discipline is still alive and well and continues to add significantly to our understanding. Hanna Pfeifer and Regine Schwab open with a contribution which challenges one of the key binaries which has shaped our understandings and approaches to studying civil wars, the state-non-state division. Using a series of examples from the Middle East they demonstrate how the blurring of the lines between state and non-state actors has complicated the realities of civil wars in the region and suggest a range of responses for significantly deepening all civil wars research by focusing agendas on the ways in which actors are connected. In a similar vein, Corinna Jentzsch and Abbey Steele bring us to discussion of the ‘order turn’ (Waterman and Worrall 2020), examining the importance of social control in civil wars. Focusing in particular on the problem of forced migration, they develop a typology of social control, reflect on the ways in which existing literature has both captured and ignored the processes of social control in conflict and advance a series of pathways around which future research can focus to bring issues of control and order deeper into our analytical and conceptual frameworks. Finally, Hilary Matfess zooms down into the micro-dynamics within rebel groups, another form of ordering process. She assesses the importance of bringing to bear multiple social scientific lenses, from gender to family ties, asking how socialisation processes in groups affect wider civil war dynamics. She particularly highlights an agenda focusing on care and marriage practices within rebel organisations which can open up new dynamics for study. This micro-agenda has wider implications for our study of civil wars more broadly, forcing us to reconsider the ways in which complex social dynamics at all levels shape, and are shaped by, intra-state conflicts.

We then have a Special Section featuring Oliver Richmond’s duo of articles which examine the evolution of the international peace architecture and the influences on the structures which have shaped responses to the growing problem of intra-state conflict over the decades. We approached a number of scholars to write responses to these two articles, reflecting on both the contribution and on the omissions of these pieces, as well as offering critical visions of the current situation facing increasingly complex civil war settings with the compromised global peace architecture that we have at our disposal. Sadly, due to personal reasons, two of our three respondents had to drop out quite late in the process and we have not been able to replace their important contributions which were respectively from a Global South perspective and through a gender lens. If any readers wish to engage in the debate that we hope this Special Section will engender then do please be in touch and we will be happy to publish contributions at a later stage. For now though, Gearoid Millar offers an engaged and constructive critique of Richmond’s account and suggests some key pathways for further research on these topics which we hope will stimulate debate.

As we had hoped in our initial call, the 25th Anniversary Special Issue has a rich Reviews Section with a series of articles which revisit key volumes that have either had a major impact in shaping the field or which offer important contributions that are worth revisiting and thinking about anew in the coming years. Our Reviews Team, Rebecca Tapscott and Daniel Rincón Machón open the section with an overview of Civil Wars reviews section over the past quarter of a century, highlighting key themes and changes by looking back. They also introduce the Reviews Section of this Special Issue emphasising some of the key overlaps and important ways in which revisiting important works can help, in both assessing their impact but also reinterpreting the key ideas from the past and taking them forward in new and useful ways. We do not want to overly rehearse their introduction here, but this is an especially rich set of contributions. José Antonio Gutiérrez re-examines the role of Charles Tilly’s work, and especially the war-making and state-making models, asking whether they still have relevance today. Nicholas Barnes looks at the legacy of the book which most people believe was the real start of the ‘micro-turn’ in the discipline, Stathis Kalyvas’ The Logic of Violence in Civil War’. Anastasia Shesterinina takes us in a slightly different direction but still related to micro-dynamics by exploring the many legacies of Lee Ann Fuji’s work and the lessons they hold for us today. Matthijs Bogaards shows us the importance of engaging critically with the ‘classics’ in the field, using the example of Mansfield and Snyder’s Electing to Fight to remind us to continue to question received wisdom. Stéphanie Perazzone meanwhile reminds us of the value of examining the problem of civil wars though a range of diverse lenses, using the work of bell hooks to highlight the continuing importance of looking for the dynamics of power and domination that underpin these problems. Finally, Rebecca and Daniel return to round off the Reviews Section with a contribution which introduces Civil Wars’ revamped reviews section with an exciting agenda designed to breathe life into debates, discussions and the ways in which we generate and assess different forms of knowledge. As a journal we invite you to join us in making this section a vibrant community, here Daniel and Rebecca outline a series of important new types of review and ways that you can get involved.

The issue concludes with a piece from us as Editors, both of the 25th Anniversary Special Issue and, of course, of the journal itself. We use the contributions of the issue to both look back at the development of the field and Civil Wars’ place within it and look forward to the future of the discipline, while also mapping out some of the initiatives that the journal will be taking forward in the coming years.

We hope that this 25th Anniversary Special Issue sparks deep reflection and engaged and constructive debate about the past, present and future of our shared field of study. It is a privilege to see the field grow and evolve from our vantage point, but we also want to use our position to help people make connections, to share and develop knowledge and to act as a platform for our community to exchange ideas and to debate the issues, both on the printed page and beyond. Additionally, we would like to invite you to think about contributing to the journal by taking this Anniversary Special Issue forward by treating this as a continuing call for papers for our ‘Reimagining the Field’ series, which will be the way in which you can examine the evolution and the future of Civil Wars Studies.

The Journey So Far…

Reaching this milestone as a journal has taken a lot of effort, from a lot of people, over the years. Given the nature of knowledge production, distribution and storage, as well as individual memories, some elements our history have become less accessible over time. When the journal began much of its work was done through hardcopy and the postal service, likewise, the transition to digital (which did not occur until 2015) inevitably missed some of that physical history. One of these is the front material of the hard copies of the journal and with it the lists of those people who have worked on Civil Wars. Even in digital format the website itself has been updated only with the latest team, and thus there is no easily accessible record of those who have worked on the journal over the years. Here we want to recognise, in one place, the hard work of those who have ensured the success of Civil Wars over the past 25 years.

1998–2005

Founding Editor: Caroline Kennedy-Pipe (1998–2005)

Co-Editor: David Keithly (2001–2006)

Assistant Editors: Clive Jones and (between 1998–2001) Neil Melvin

Review Article Editor: Ami Pedahzur (2002–2010)

2006–2010

Co-Editors: Clive Jones and Alice Hills

Assistant Editor: James Worrall

Book Reviews Editor: Michael Denison (2006–2008)

Book Reviews Editor: Andrew Mumford (2008–2012)

2010–2016

Editor: Edward Newman (2010–2014)

Co-Editors: Edward Newman and Asaf Siniver (2015–2016)

Associate Editors: Karl Cordell, Asaf Siniver, Stefan Wolff

Assistant Editor: Benjamin Zala (2010–2013)

Assistant Editor: Slawomir Raszewski (2013–2015)

Assistant Editor: Andris Banka (2015–2017)

Book Reviews Editor: Andrew Mumford (2010–2011)

Reviews Editor: James Worrall (2012–2021)

Associate Reviews Editor: Alex Waterman (2015–2021)

2017–2021

Co-Editors: Paul Jackson and Jonathan Fisher

Associate Editors: Karl Cordell and Stefan Wolff (2017–2020)

Assistant Editor: Tom Jarvis (2017–2019)

Assistant Editor: Robert Skinner (2019–2021)

Deputy Editor: Sukanya Podder (2020-Present)

Reviews Editor: James Worrall

Associate Reviews Editor: Alex Waterman

2022-Present

Co-Editors: James Worrall and Alex Waterman

Assistant Editor: Migena Pengili

Deputy Editor: Sukanya Podder

Reviews Editor: Rebecca Tapscott

Associate Reviews Editor: Daniel Rincón Machón

Finally, a big thank you to those who have submitted articles to the journal, written book reviews, sat on our editorial board, worked behind the scenes at the publishers, peer reviewed for us, and also to those who have read its pages and cited our articles over the past two and a half decades, the journal would not be here without your contributions and engagement. We look forward to continuing to work with the Civil Wars family, helping to advance and reflect this vibrant and exciting field of study with a view to making a positive contribution to academic and policy knowledge through the pages of Civil Wars over the next 25 years. While intra-state conflict continues to cause such suffering for so many, we are thankful for the kindness and support of the community of scholars that seek to understand and address its causes and consequences.

Acknowledgements

A very special thanks to all of the contributors to the Special Issue, and especially the Civil Wars team for helping us pull this off. We all knew that bringing this Special Issue together in such a short space of time was going to be a real challenge - it has certainly been that and sometimes more. We are very grateful to Rebecca and Daniel for doing such a sterling job with getting the reviews together and drumming up contributions. Particular thanks though go to Megghi whose deep engagement, absolute commitment and many, many skills have been key to enabling us to get to the finishing line!

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.

Alex Waterman

Alex Waterman is outgoing Research Fellow (India/Asia) at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA), Hamburg and incoming Lecturer in Peace Studies and International Development, in the Department of Peace Studies and International Development at the University of Bradford, UK. His research has been published in leading journals such as Journal of Global Security Studies, International Peacekeeping, Asian Security, Civil Wars and Small Wars & Insurgencies. While in 2020 his doctoral research won the Global Policy North Outstanding Thesis Prize. He has held visiting affiliations with the Modern War Institute at West Point, the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS), the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MPIDSA) and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS). He is Co-Editor of Civil Wars.