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Internal Conflict and Political Violence: New Developments in Research Stathis N. Kalyvas Foreword It is no exaggeration to say that the study of internal conflict and political violence has undergone a remarkable boom during the past twenty years. This area of study— how order, conflict, and violence interact—has grown from a peripheral topic to a central concern for scholars of both comparative politics and international relations. What is more, economists, anthropologists , psychologists, historians, and sociologists have joined in the quest to better understand this set of political and social phenomena. While each of these disciplines and subfields continues to be characterized by its own methodological preferences, some of the best emerging work is characterized by questions and methods that cross traditional disciplinary and subdisciplinary divides and synthesize insights from multiple fields. It is worth taking a step back and asking about the explosion of interest in civil conflict. I believe that it reflects the convergence of three distinct political developments. The first one is a rather delayed effect of the realization that interstate conflict has become an increasingly uncommon occurrence—and is likely to remain so. The end of World War II and the institutionalization of territorial nationalism into a fundamental component of international politics spelled the end of wars of conquest, even where ethnic minority issues remained unresolved and, thus, a source of intra- and inter-state friction. At the same time, the invention of nuclear weapons has made Great Power war obsolete. As a result, a previously residual type of war turned into the main, if not the only, war actually fought: civil war. Studying war now calls for taking internal conflict seriously—a hard lesson for scholars hardwired to assume state unity and dismiss non-state actors as secondary. The second development is associated with the end of the Cold War. By disconnecting internal conflict from superpower competition, this momentous political development persuaded scholars of comparative politics that civil wars were fully legitimate domestic phenomena and, therefore, worth incorporating into the study of comparative politics. The difficulty here consisted in engaging the messy world of militarized con- flict, in which the rules of the game were both less familiar to scholars of comparative politics and harder to discern compared to those of peaceful internal political processes, whether democratic or autocratic. xii | rethinking violence The third development consisted of the realization by political economists that internal conflict was a major impediment to economic development . This realization, also greatly conditioned by the end of the Cold War, convinced economists that they had to take internal political conflict seriously if they were to understand and tackle the obstacles to economic development. In sum, the decline of interstate war led international relations scholars to focus their attention much more on civil wars, just when the end of the Cold War convinced both comparative politics researchers and development economists that civil wars were domestic processes with important political and economic repercussions. The advent of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, on the eve of the twenty-first century, reinforced this development by injecting into it a higher dose of political salience. Naturally, this development has not occurred without growing pains. International relations scholars often conceptualize non-state political factions involved in civil wars as monolithic actors akin to states writ small. In the process, ethnic groups have been reified as political actors at the expense of a reality characterized by political organizations making more or less credible claims in the name of ethnic groups. Comparative politics scholars have tended to downgrade transnational and international factors affecting domestic political conflict, and have generally ignored the military dimension of these conflicts. Finally, economists have been prone to the temptation of caricaturing political institutions and dismissing the political dimensions of civil wars in favor of facile characterizations based on criminality. Fortunately, an emerging generation of scholars is moving beyond these shortcomings. While building on existing research, they are able to overcome the divide between interstate and domestic politics, combine methods from several disciplines, and pay close attention to context and history. Overall, recent research is characterized by a key step: theoretical and empirical disaggregation on several dimensions: • The disaggregation of space so as to focus on subnational and subregional variation, thus making possible a better understanding of the complexity inherent in these processes and generating data of higher quality. • The disaggregation, or sequencing, of the temporal processes that precede...

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