For three decades, comparative phylogeography has conceptually and methodologically relied on the concordance criterion for providing insights into the historical/biogeographic processes driving population genetic structure and divergence. Here we discuss how this emphasis, and the corresponding lack of methods for extracting information about biotic/intrinsic contributions to patterns of genetic variation, may bias our general understanding of the factors driving genetic structure. Specifically, this emphasis has promoted a tendency to attribute discordant phylogeographic patterns to the idiosyncracies of history, as well as an adherence to generic null expectations of concordance with reduced predictive power. We advocate that it is time for a paradigm shift in comparative phylogeography, especially given the limited utility of the concordance criterion as genomic data provide ever-increasing levels of resolution. Instead of adhering to the concordance-discordance dichotomy, comparative phylogeography needs to emphasize the contribution of taxon-specific traits that will determine whether concordance is a meaningful criterion for evaluating hypotheses or may predict discordant phylogeographic structure. Through reference to some case studies we illustrate how refined hypotheses based on taxon-specific traits can provide improved predictive frameworks to forecast species responses to climatic change or biogeographic barriers while gaining unique insights about the taxa themselves and their interactions with their environment. We outline a potential avenue toward a synthetic comparative phylogeographic paradigm that includes addressing some important conceptual and methodological challenges related to study design and application of model-based approaches for evaluating support of trait-based hypotheses under the proposed paradigm.biogeography | ecological traits | coalescent modeling | Pleistocene | statistical phylogeography P aralleling its critical role in identifying biogeographic phenomena by common structuring of genetic variation across taxa, comparative phylogeography has the potential to offer unprecedented insights about the taxa themselves. We here make an argument that such a paradigm shift, in which the contribution of biotic attributes are a focal point, as opposed to an emphasis on abiotic factors, is not only a valuable endeavor in itself, but it is also critical to (i) understanding the relative contributions of abiotic/extrinsic (e.g., geography, geological, or climatic history) vs. biotic/intrinsic (e.g., ecological or life history traits; hereafter referred to as biotic) factors in structuring genetic variation and divergence across taxa, as well as (ii) determining the relative prevalence of deterministic processes versus stochasticity in the evolutionary history of taxa, and we argue that (iii) the key to meaningful insights is not just a function of the statistical support we might have for a model, but it also depends on the creativity of biologists to identify hypotheses that are releva...