Understanding Civil War from Pre- to Post-War Stages: A Comparative Approach

• In Event: Civil War Paths

Abstract

The literature on civil war has made significant advances, deepening our understanding of structural determinants and micro-foundations of civil war. However, this literature has in general examined civil war in isolation from broader conflict. Few studies of civil war have looked at the dynamics that connect the pre-war, war, and post-war stages of conflict to one another. Most studies have viewed civil war as a single phenomenon that follows a common logic. This paper introduces the Civil War Paths project that develops a process-oriented, actor-centered, and relational approach to the study of civil war. The project conceptualizes civil war as a process that connects the pre-war, war, and post-war stages of conflict, explores a range of actors and their interactions over time to understand how civil wars evolve, and argues that civil wars follow different paths based on how they emerge, unfold, and end or transform. We trace the foundations of different paths to the organizational origins of non-state armed groups, in line with the organizational turn in the literature on civil war and efforts such as the Foundations of Rebel Group Emergence (FORGE) dataset to systematize the study of armed group origins.

How non-state armed groups form shapes these groups’ internal structure, support base, and capacity to engage with other actors in military, political, and social domains. Groups that emerge from social movement mobilization will likely be more organized, embedded within the local population in the areas of their operations, and linked to other actors based on their prior activities than clandestine militant groups that depend on small numbers of committed members and secrecy for their ability to survive. Finally, groups that form in the context of fragmentation within the regime through coup d’état attempts or government splits will combine the elements of social movement and clandestine formations and additionally have access to military skills and resources which social movements and clandestine groups often lack. These organizational origins set civil wars in motion with path-dependent effects but dynamics endogenous to civil war, from counterinsurgency strategies, to civilian non-cooperation, and international efforts to bring the fighting to an end, interact with these effects and can change the course of the war. The paper outlines this theoretical framework and the case selection strategy and field-based methodological approach drawing on this framework that inform the comparative research in this project.

Author

• Anastasia Shesterinina, University of York