Understanding Civil Wars: Looking Back to Look Forwards

As this 25th Anniversary Special Issue has shown, there has been a significant amount of evolution and exciting change in the ways in which we have approached the study of civil wars, alongside profound developments in the depth and breadth of our understanding about almost all aspects of these conflicts. The growth and sophistication of our knowledge and awareness of their complexity, however, has only served to reveal just how little we really understand about them.

In this brief essay, we attempt to draw together some of the threads which are present throughout this Special Issue, with the aim of using them to highlight some of the bigger questions hidden within. In looking backwards at how our field has developed, with all its contingencies and omissions, we can take stock and look forward towards the many challenges and choices which remain, in the hope that we can avoid the mistakes of the past, to create a better and more reflexive understanding of the phenomena involved. If the past is a guide to the future, we can expect to see much more exciting progress towards fuller understanding over the next 25 years ahead.

We also highlight the role of Civil Wars as a journal and outline some of the initiatives we are working on, including ways in which you can be more closely involved through the fostering of a clearer community of civil war scholars.

Taking Stock of the 25th Anniversary Special Issue

Much of the early literature was attempting to make some sort of sense of why civil wars happened, why there were seemingly so many of them and whether they were different in form to those of the past. The emergence of a distinct field of Civil War Studies was, of course, strongly influenced by the environment which created it. One which in the post-Cold War world, in the middle of the ‘unipolar moment’, was suddenly able to focus on civil wars as a central security concern. As several essays in this Special Issue have highlighted (Piccolino, 2023; Abetya et al., 2023; Landau and Cho, 2023), the influence of global events was strongly felt. In particular, renewed international attention to conflicts in the Balkans and Africa during the 1990s and especially the turn towards the ‘War on Terror’ had a strong imprint on the development of the field – both in direct response to, and through pushbacks against these agendas. Such developments also meant key regions occupied prominent positions in the field; in particular Africa, the Middle East and Latin America (especially Colombia) played central roles in conceptual debates. Yet as Juliana Tappe Ortiz (2023) highlights in her review of the impact of studies of Colombia on the discipline of civil wars, structural factors beyond the events themselves, such as accessibility and policy priorities, have also significantly shaped the representation of particular cases. The field is, for instance, strongly influenced by its broadly Anglo-American origins but also through the broader concentration of scholars focusing on these issues in the Global North. Initially, civil wars as phenomena were studied more intently and with much greater resource in those countries (as reflected in a broad view of submissions to Civil Wars over the last 25 years), this structural dynamic continues to create what David Brenner and Enze Han call an ‘uneven empirical landscape’ in which some conflicts or regions are distinctly more visible than others. This of course risks skewing theory towards the ‘usual suspects’, creating real issues for approaches striving for generalisability (Brenner and Han 2021), and thus represents a continuing challenge for the field.

A visual representation of case studies in Civil Wars¹ articles over the last 10 years highlights some of these challenges, and our own ‘uneven empirical landscape’. African cases have broadly dominated the field of civil wars since the late 1990s, and this is reflected in the number of cases published in the journal. This attention is understandable, perhaps due to a combination of the prevalence of conflicts, an international drive to respond to them through the emerging international peace architecture of the 1990s (see Piccolino, Abetya et al and Landau and Cho’s contributions, 2023) and from the 2000s onwards, the growing militarisation of regions such as the Sahel, Horn and Niger Delta brought about by the War on Terror. The relatively low number of South and Southeast Asia-focused articles is, however, a clear concern. While there have been important steps taken to better integrate these regions (as can be seen in Paul Staniland’s (2023) reflection in this issue on his own work on South Asia and its place in the wider field), there is much that remains understudied and misunderstood, particularly in those conflict zones with many sub-conflicts such as those in Myanmar or Northeast India. Building on Juliana’s excellent account of Colombia’s place in the wider civil wars literature, we strongly encourage the submission of future articles that explore not only the impact of influential regions on the wider discipline but also the possible implications of integrating debates from understudied regions into wider disciplinary conversations. To this end, we would also encourage both individual articles and special issues focusing on conflicts in Myanmar (Burma), Thailand and India’s central and north-eastern regions, as well as the whole of the Asia-Pacific region which receives very little attention in case studies of civil wars.

The composition of this Anniversary Special Issue also reflects further structural issues which need to be addressed over the coming years. While we were delighted to achieve an equitable gender balance (of approximately 50%) in the Special Issue as a whole – and more than two-thirds of the articles in the main Contributions section written by female scholars – as we also mentioned in the introduction though, we were less successful in securing contributions from the Global South. Civil Wars has taken some important and active steps in recent years to support contributions from scholars based in countries which have been affected by civil war. As Jonathan Fisher and Paul Jackson highlight in their contribution, appointing Sukanya Podder as a Deputy Editor to provide Global South-based authors with a layer of pre-submission feedback was an invaluable step in getting more Global South submissions both to, and through, the stage of peer review. We can and should, however, go further. In the coming year, we plan to expand the editorial board with a view to dialling up the breadth and scope of this process, while also addressing some of the regional balances in expertise to encourage more submissions on neglected civil wars and regions. We hope to recruit a team of editorial board members focused on both marketing the journal and soliciting Global South submissions in the first place, as well as board members dedicated to coaching authors through the process.

This issue, in looking back at key evolutions in the big debates and disciplinary shifts, has also highlighted the impact of access to new or refined data in driving conceptual advances. While Jason Quinn and Matthew Hauenstein’s contribution (2023) reflects on the new insights that can be gleaned from revisiting Licklider (1998) and Dixon’s (2009) seminal work on civil wars termination in light of newly-available data, Shaver et al. (2023) highlight how future data collection can expand on current conflict event datasets, continuing the process of filling empirical blind spots and refining concepts through access to new data.

Many of the contributions in this issue have not only reflected on existing concepts but sought to drive forward new advances, whether identifying big-picture ‘waves’ in civil wars research (Staniland, 2023; Stewart, 2023) or synthesising past advances in specific themes such as alliance formation (Corradi, 2023), escalation and de-escalation (Diaz Pabon and Duyvesteyn, 2023) and the social processes of civil wars and armed groups (Jentzsch and Steele, 2023; Matfess, 2023) or to chart out both conceptual and methodological pathways ahead (Pfeifer and Schwab, 2023). Other contributions have examined the works of those who have critically interrogated the very way we think about notions such as power and domination and their influence on critical approaches to reflecting on our understanding and research practices when it comes to civil wars (Perazzone, 2023; Shesterinina, 2023). In doing so, all of the above works have not only highlighted the advances of the last 25 years but through their insightful contributions have also demonstrated the promise that an increasingly diversified and reflexive field has to offer for advancing our understanding of civil wars.

The issue’s broad surveys of the development of the field, whether our Journey pieces or the reflections of previous editors, all hold a broad consensus that the field is becoming increasingly diverse, in terms of conceptual approaches, methodologies and approaches to data. While our contributors highlight the opportunities that this may bring, they also note the risks that such diversification entails, such as an increased siloing into ever narrower sub-fields or methodological and epistemological traditions, or indeed conversely, a broadening of definitions beyond any utility. As the field continues to expand and diversify, this trend raises important questions of how to embrace the benefits of diversity whilst maintaining dialogues, exchanges of ideas, collaborations and community across narrower sub-fields and particular traditions. So, what unites us as a field of study and how might we overcome the potential challenges of fragmentation and over-specialism in order to maintain a degree of cohesion? To answer these questions, perhaps it is best to ask an even bigger question.

Is There a Field of Civil War Studies?

From a purely logical perspective, civil wars remain a major global challenge and are an observable phenomenon amenable to study. Therefore, it seems obvious that there is, and should be, a field of study devoted to understanding them. Indeed, in the late 1990s the arrival of both positivist and normative work which attempted to capture the macro picture of drivers of these conflicts strongly suggested that a field of Civil War Studies was both necessary and desirable. Since then, the explosion of academic work on civil wars, and on closely intertwined fields such as statebuilding and intervention, has created considerable knowledge, but this has also led to a significant expansion of the original focus of the field, and rightly so. Our field is wonderfully porous to new ideas and methods from elsewhere and is very inclusive of many different approaches, but at what point does it cease being a coherent field of study and become just an empty label? This discussion has parallels with concepts such as Human Security, which also came to the fore in mid-late 1990s (Paris 2001, Newman 2004) with much debate over what it is and whether it is even useful as a term. Is there really a coherent entity that can be labelled ‘Civil War Studies’? If so, what would it look like?

As Staniland (2023) asks, are we seeing a move away from Civil War Studies to simply studies of political violence more broadly conceived? This is an important question because it forces us to consider both the utility and baggage of the replacement term ‘political violence’ and what we might lose by abandoning or diluting, specifically, Civil War Studies as a field. While certainly fitting into wider studies of political violence, is there something uniquely useful in focusing on civil wars that merits them having their own field?

As studies of these conflicts have developed over the past two and a half decades, we have increasingly been able to disaggregate between different types of civil war. Recognising that not all civil wars are the same is easy enough but knowing what to do about it in terms of the implications for research design, comparison and labelling is much harder. If there are in fact such significant differences between say the US civil war and those in Lebanon or Liberia then perhaps the term civil war is not enough and we need to more clearly distinguish between these conflicts?

In many senses, because of the time period in which the field grew, there does seem to be a certain fixity in terms of what we understand civil wars to be: i.e. largely what Kaldor was referring to as ‘new wars’ which she has continued to defend as a concept (2013). There has certainly been relatively little focus on the kind of civil war with two conventional forces within our field, and even less on the pages of this journal. The US civil war, for example, has its own eco-system of journals, conferences and debates which does not connect well with our field being, both largely historical in method and focused frequently on tiny niches. Thus, with rare exceptions, the US civil war (Stewart and Kitchens 2021) and other cases such as the Chinese civil war (e.g. Stewart 2021) receive little attention in our field. Even the conflicts of the 1960s and 1970s are either treated as being for historians or as cases for allied fields such as counterinsurgency studies, which in turn tends to focus on the usual cases e.g. Algeria, Malaya, Kenya. These civil wars rarely receive attention, even as comparative case studies, either for theory development, testing or comparison in our field. Whether they are simply perceived to not be relevant to today’s challenges, are the domain only of historians or indeed are seen to be of a different type or form of civil war entirely is somewhat unclear. But the result is a field of Civil War Studies which is only really interested in the phenomenon of civil war from the 1990s onwards, which would appear to be an inherently limiting stricture. It also raises important questions about the way in which we have collectively and largely subconsciously evolved as a field in this manner.

Indeed, there are clearly a range of other sub-fields which connect into the study of civil war but also stand apart from it, with their own traditions, temporal and spatial boundaries and ways of doing things. One of these might be termed ‘Insurgency Studies’ which clearly connects with civil wars but often only engages tangentially with the ideas and debates in our field. Insurgency Studies frequently draws far more on Strategic Studies and Military Studies than it does on some of the literatures on the nature and organisation of insurgent groups that we have seen evolve in our own field. These are clearly significant issues, both for defining a field of study, but also in terms of enabling insights to be fully debated and cross-fertilised between fields.

Our field has come a long way but important questions and challenges do remain. It is undoubtedly good that we are beyond classifications of civil wars as having clear start and end dates, or measuring them in terms of battle-related deaths, seemingly no-one is denying that the origins of civil wars have long roots before conflict breaks out or is simply referring to these roots as ‘ancient hatreds’. However, how do we know what our field is when these boundaries are rightly challenged? Are there actually useful analytical distinctions between the concepts of insurgency and terrorism, riots and civil disobedience, or indeed between political violence and civil war? If political violence is an umbrella term for all of these things, then that might be useful because it means that the analytical distinctions and overlaps can both be recognised and accommodated. If, on the other hand, it tries to be a clear field of study, then is political violence not just a more abstracted and fragmented field of study than that of civil wars?

At the same time, is there not also a wider problem here in that both terms reify violence as the central characteristic which interests us, whether that be its causes, delivery or effects? If societies are dysfunctional but manage to contain political violence, or if social movements mobilise but sit at the threshold of a transition into violence, does this warrant their exclusion from our analyses? The majority of work in our field has tended to focus on violence in some form, and there are clearly excellent reasons for this, both because of the negative effects it carries both locally and globally, but also because human beings do tend to be fascinated by violence. Can a field of Civil War Studies thrive if we were to place less emphasis on studying the direct violence it entails and instead focus much more directly on the politics and the social change which causes civil wars, and the ensuing conflicts which often accelerate ongoing changes? Would decentring violence lead to different questions being asked and new unexpected answers being developed?

Asking the really difficult questions such as these, remains important for us all, it forces us to re-visit our fundamental assumptions, to find new ways of working and new questions to explore, hopefully taking us closer to a deeper understanding of our subject of study.

When thinking about what Civil War Studies might be and how it developed, we can certainly identify that both the existence and form of the field is, partly at least, down to its particular evolution. Its close links to policy and to particular policy agendas certainly shaped early agendas around ‘failed states’, ‘conflict entrepreneurs’ and ‘greed vs. grievance’. We know that much work, both at the time and since, has pushed back against these agendas either explicitly or implicitly and has led to important advancements in the field which have challenged simplistic, and often deeply problematic, assumptions. But at the same time this remains a field which, broadly speaking, does want to make a difference and does want to contribute to better policy which can reduce the multiple harms that civil wars cause. While the legacies of the early field’s connections with key ideas and their associated phraseology have continuing resonances, they are undoubtedly less important than they were. Meanwhile, Stewart (2023) and Gutierrez’s (2023) contributions to this Special Issue also remind us of the ways in which Civil War Studies has been influenced, both openly and more tacitly, by the studies of revolution and social movements of the 1960s and 1970s (also though more recent works in this tradition, e.g., Tilly et al. 2001, Demetriou et al. 2014). The connections of the field to core (comparative) politics texts of this period reminds us of our wider intellectual inheritance and position in the discipline of politics. Although it remains important to recognise that there are many pathways towards civil wars outside of some of the assumptions in these connected scholarly traditions.

While our field is ultimately remarkably interdisciplinary, its origins in political ‘science’, and its continuing dominance as the main approach within the field of Civil War Studies, at times can come at the expense of historical, sociological and anthropological approaches. This can be a problem which can prevent both interdisciplinarity and innovation from truly flourishing, as the prevalence of the perhaps now somewhat clichéd 2 × 2 table demonstrates, but it does provide a degree of a ‘common core’ of frames of reference for many in the field. There is no easy way around these tensions of course but it remains important that we recognise them, continue to engage with works from outside of a politics frame and make efforts to make our own work more reflexive and interdisciplinary. All of this, so that our field can have an identity which is built through its recognition not just of the abstract importance of diversity but of the practice of interdisciplinarity which creates methods, practices and epistemologies which are unique to the field and the challenges of studying the complex socio-political phenomenon of civil war.

One example of a structural constraint on this process is the politics of compressed citation lists, particularly in journal articles with strict word limits. This creates intense pressures for those within specific silos to include their particular ’must-cites’. As an editorial team, we are keen to create every opportunity for cross-fertilisation and dialogue within the field. In this 25^th Anniversary Special Issue, we began to trial excluding citations from word counts, allowing our contributors to ‘let the citations fly’ removed these constraints and allowed for a thoughtful consideration of the full(er) range of influences some of our authors had. In tandem with other initiatives (such as seeking to cultivate thematic issues that cut across methodological divides), this is a practice we plan to continue for all future articles, to reflect the breadth of the conversations within civil wars research. As such, we will advertise this as an important policy of the journal and remind authors of the freedom they have to cite extensively across disciplines and to ensure that a wide range of voices and perspectives are heard and included.

At base, as many of our contributions highlight, our discipline relates to complex social processes. As Anastasia Shesterinina notes in her reflections on Lee Ann Fuji (2023), civil wars are relational, contingent, evolving, and about both continuity and change (see also: Worrall, 2017, Waterman and Worrall, 2020, Shesterinina, 2022). We also think that our discipline, like many, has had a tendency to privilege ‘newness’ over longer-term, enduring elements. It needs to engage much more with longue durée studies of civil wars, often over centuries, not just to see this as a global historical phenomenon but also ensure that the conflicts which we study are more fully located in histories of violence, statebuilding, systems of oppression and resistance, and cycles of intervention.

As well as the inevitable structural constraints which both limit our time as academics and also force certain patterns of publication, additionally, we tend to lack the higher-level theoretical tools to do this kind of big-picture synthesised work. Despite this, there is a strong assortment of excellent mid/meso-level theory; take, for example, Paul Staniland’s Social-Institutional Theory (Staniland 2014) which has been important in making us think about linkages between states, people and rebels. There are also the many theoretical approaches to the micro-dynamics of violence, governance and order emerging from work inspired by Kalyvas (2006; see also Barnes, 2023, this issue). We also have many rich case studies, albeit with strong biases towards certain civil wars and away from others, but there remains a broad lack of both big picture studies of civil war as a global phenomenon and of attempts to theorise civil war at almost a meta level of abstraction. The relative lack of these bigger picture theorisations since the push-back against the initial attempts of the earliest days of the field is understandable but still somewhat surprising.

As part of the preparation for the 25th Anniversary Special Issue, we engaged in a number of conversations with others working on these topics and began to identify strengths and weaknesses in the field, as well as how it might productively develop. We asked questions such as what are the classic works in the field? We were surprised that there didn’t seem to be as many as we might have thought there would be and that they did not spring easily to mind. We could think of a lot of great books but only a couple that were both recognisably of our field and published in the past quarter of a century which could be labelled ‘classics’. Mary Kaldor’s New and Old Wars: Organised Violence in a Global Era (1999/2013) was an important attempt to theorise change and to find patterns. While Edward Newman’s Understanding Civil Wars: Continuity and Change in Intrastate Conflict (2014) pushed the field on at a meta-level because it refocused on the importance of the state in civil wars while also recognising that particular contexts matter, a decentring of some of the local dynamics and a broad sweep of coverage was thus a useful contrast to the ‘micro-turn’ also because it tried to refocus on common themes across civil wars (see also his Editorial Reflection in this Special issue, Newman, 2023). This lack of true ‘classics’ perhaps again forces us to revisit the nature of what a field is, and whether Civil War Studies can be a clear field without such works. We might argue that it does not necessarily matter but it does remain an important question and challenge for the field.

In the absence of such a ‘systematic treatise on civil war’ akin to the classics of political theory (Kissane 2016, p. 3), we would like to see further, interdisciplinary research deal with the core, almost philosophical dimensions of the question ‘what is civil war?’, as well as more consideration of the epistemologies and ontologies which underpin our field and its intellectual history. The dearth of these contributions, which simply didn’t arrive in response to our call for papers for this 25^th Anniversary Special Issue, was a real surprise to us. We had hoped that people would rise to the challenge! We do of course have contributions here which do engage, often indirectly, with these issues but the absence of standalone contributions thinking about these issues is interesting through its absence. We do, however, have contributions which reflect strongly on the nature of knowledge generation, methodological challenges and assumptions within our work which represent important contributions to these wider debates (Barnes 2023, Bogaards 2023, Shaver et al. 2023). Within this theme and to this end of encouraging reflection on epistemology and ontology more broadly, Oliver Richmond’s articles on ‘The Greats’ and the International Peace Architecture (2023a, 2023b) and Gearoid Millar’s response (2023) are a welcome starting point of a much broader conversation on these kinds of issues, hopefully to be had within the pages of our journal.

It appears that while the ‘micro-turn’ was critical, in so many ways, for the development of the field, it has to a degree refocused the field’s initially highly macro focus onto specific cases and trends which do not always easily speak to each other. It is only in more recent years that work focusing on creating mid-range theory around specific dynamics within civil wars, for example, Sarah Parkinson’s examination of organisational adaptation (2023), temporal and spatialised armed orders (Staniland, 2021), or particularly on the earliest stages of conflict (Lewis 2020) has become much more prevalent. Undoubtedly, our own research has been strongly influenced by many of the exceptional works with this micro-focus, indeed we find ourselves by inclination drawn to micro-dynamics, this approach however, which is now dominant does have some dangers for the field.

While there is important work at the micro, meso and macro levels there does seem to be more of a lack of work which both crosses those levels and which builds bridges between them. Focusing on different levels of analysis can also encourage greater comparison both within and between cases, which in turn can lead to broader observations and lays the foundations for theory building. A renewed attention to the importance of crossing and conjoining different levels of analysis (often also while combining different methodologies) can play an important role in taking the field forward. While there is no doubt that we have significant ‘irons in the fire’ on this, it seems to us that the ‘order turn’ (Waterman and Worrall, 2020) in Civil War Studies offers one potentially very productive way in which work can cross different levels of analysis in a systematic and productive manner. Orders can be highly localised, but these orders are always nested within relations with multiple layers of wider social, political and economic order. They are deeply relational and both implicitly and explicitly political. Approaches to theorise order and order-in-conflict inherently therefore cross levels of analysis and have the potential to generate macro-level insights and theorisation. Order also fits well with other concepts, such as socialisation, legitimacy, identity, narratives, conflict dynamics and social processes which are all now coming to the forefront of the field of Civil War Studies.

Based on the contributions to this Special Issue then, and no doubt also our own biases, it seems to us that the way in which the field is developing is exciting, with a bright future rich in new insights, deeper reflexivity and greater pluralism. The fact that so much of this work is increasingly embedded in the relationality of civil wars and their social processes offers significant opportunities for deeper and more nuanced understanding. The challenge will undoubtedly be to identify cross-case and phenomenon-wide patterns in this rich variety of data that will enable the construction of more nuanced theoretical frames and hopefully, over time, greater macro-level understanding of civil wars. There remains much work to do to further our knowledge and there are important debates to be had, and questions to be asked, when it comes to the nature of our field of study. This Special Issue is designed to be a stimulant for these conversations.

The Role of the Journal

While there are a number of journals publishing on civil wars, or themes related to civil war, in both generalist IR and politics journals and, of course, some of our specialist sister journals such as Peacebuilding, Small Wars and Insurgencies and the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, we remain the only journal focusing on civil war as a broad phenomenon and as our primary focus. The journal has undoubtedly been successful in establishing itself as a key, specialist journal in the field on the causes, triggers, dynamics, intensity, termination and recurrence of civil war, spanning a wide range of conflicts, widening its approach over time to integrate emerging issues and approaches and in doing so remaining at the cutting edge of conflict research.

This 25th Anniversary Special Issue has been designed to showcase our field of study, reflect on its development and to celebrate the journal’s role. In this way, it was, and is, expressly designed to engender debate and dialogue. We wanted it to do many things, but above all to start a series of conversations. As a journal, Civil Wars is not just an outlet for research, but it is also a home for discussion and engagement. We hope that by pulling back from our individual research agendas to debate the bigger picture of what the field is, and can be, will be a fruitful exercise intellectually and practically.

One main way of continuing this process is through our Reimagining the Field series of essays, these are fully peer reviewed, full-length articles, which revisit old debates or highlight emerging fields of study, methodologies or theoretical approaches. They combine research with review and, crucially, plot pathways forwards by highlighting opportunities and pitfalls. They have many purposes, from stimulating reflection, examining assumptions and biases, as well as piloting ideas, but above all they are about creating a dedicated space which can stimulate discussions. We very much hope to receive many more submissions in this category to build on the momentum for debate created by the reflections and ideas in this Anniversary Special Issue.

Our new reviews section, under the leadership of Rebecca and Daniel (Tapscott and Rincón Machón 2023), will also be a key forum for dialogue and the exchange of ideas. In pulling back from the old way of doing reviews, we hope to make space for different voices, for the exchange of gifts of engagement and for other knowledges to be disseminated. It would be too easy to carry on with reviews as normal. While there is undoubtedly a risk attached, because without your contributions the section will be bare, it seems important to try something new and to create a different dynamic which is more amenable to engagement and conversation.

We are also planning a future Special Issue similar to this Anniversary Issue which will focus on methodology and fieldwork in Civil War Studies. We hope to open a ‘Call for Discussions’ and will then issue a Call for Papers based on the outcomes of your varied and insightful inputs – so do keep an eye out for both calls. We hope that this will not only make for a stronger and more coherent Special Issue but that it will also embed dialogue and debate more firmly in the process of knowledge production, while giving open opportunities for people’s voices to be heard.

We are also in the process of revamping our social media presence, we are now on Linkedin and will also be using our Twitter platform as more than just an advertising space. We do hope that you will not only follow us on there but also engage with us and each other via those platforms.

Moving away from the printed page and the online world, we will ensure that the journal is a visible presence at conferences so that we can make connections in person and create spaces for in-person discussion. We intend to convene themed roundtables as frequently as possible at these events to further opportunities for debate and exchange of ideas. We will also continue to use our limited budget for drinks receptions to bring people together socially. As editors, we are happy to make ourselves available and to use our networks to facilitate engagement and discussion wherever possible. If you would like to host a discussion based on this Special Issue, or on any other topic in the field, then do please be in touch. Likewise, Civil Wars is always willing to help organise themed workshops which can become future Special Issues.

For us Civil Wars is about more than what we publish, it is about a scholarly community – for it is the relationships that we have that really make a field. With your help, we will endeavour to facilitate the health of the community, to use our convening power to build relationships, grow networks and to offer mutual support, as far as we possibly can, given the pressures on time and resources which we all face.

As we outlined in our Editorial Vision upon taking up our editorship in 2022:

In recent years, the journal has widened its remit to integrate emerging issues around the character of peacebuilding, memory and memorialisation, rebel governance, the methodological, epistemological and ethical issues of researching violent conflict and of the conduct of fieldwork in insecure settings. These are important areas, and contributions around these themes have significantly broadened and strengthened the journal’s appeal. Building closely on these themes, we would also like to encourage submissions related to the social-relational processes of intra-state armed politics (before, during and in transitions from civil war) and the epistemics of civil war policy, practice and scholarship, as well as submissions drawing on anthropological methods, theory and data. We feel that integrating these themes will further enhance the journal’s core areas and help strengthen the field of study as a whole. We continue, of course, to encourage submissions covering a diverse geographical and temporal range of cases and drawing from a variety of perspectives and methodological underpinnings, particularly those underrepresented in the literature. Remaining both a broad church and a home for work which is perhaps less in the remit of the traditional journals in the [broader] field of conflict studies can only enhance the journal’s readership, reputation and value – embodying the spirit of interdisciplinarity, dialogue and inclusivity (Worrall and Waterman 2022, pp. 1–2).

One of the key strengths of the field of Civil War Studies is its diversity of approaches, methodologies, levels of analysis and epistemologies, but we also know that there is not enough scholarship on our pages, and in the field as a whole, which originates from scholars who are from countries actually affected by civil war. This is of course a significant structural problem in general which cannot easily be overcome. That, however, does not mean that we should not act wherever we can to address the issue. We are currently in the process of revising our existing approach to attracting submissions from scholars in, and from, these places – supporting them through the peer review process to publication. There is no doubt that this is complex and certainly not straightforward, but we can do better, and we encourage you to help us in this endeavour. Please suggest the journal as a potential publication venue and help us spread the word. If you would like to be involved more closely in working with us on this crucial initiative by acting as a mentor or copyeditor, then do please be in touch. If you would like to be part of our conversations on how to redesign and then successfully implement our support for these submissions, then we would welcome your input.

Conclusion

In sum, as we hope this 25th Anniversary Special Issue has demonstrated, Civil Wars remains an ambitious journal and aims to help build the field over the coming years. With this clear agenda and sense of purpose, we hope to become more than just a venue for publication, creating instead a broader platform for knowledge sharing, debate and community building.

We hope that this 25th Anniversary Special Issue, and all the riches it contains, will enable readers to reflect on the evolution of the field and to generate rich discussion and engagement. The Special Issue is of course itself incomplete in scope and form. We have missed many sub-fields, exciting new topics and methodological approaches and we invite further contributions to reflect these gaps. So do be in touch to discuss your ideas. Civil Wars has had a very productive first 25 years, and we’re sure that with your help the next 25 will be even more so!

James and Alex.

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, 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.

Notes

1. We count an article as focusing on a particular region if the primary case study or comparisons are located within that particular region. We exclude broader theoretical/dataset-focused pieces and cross-regional comparative pieces for the purpose of this illustration.