The Logic of Violence in Civil War

Abstract

By analytically decoupling war and violence, this book explores the causes and dynamics of violence in civil war. Against the prevailing view that such violence is an instance of impenetrable madness, the book demonstrates that there is logic to it and that it has much less to do with collective emotions, ideologies, and cultures than currently believed. Kalyvas specifies a novel theory of selective violence: it is jointly produced by political actors seeking information and individual civilians trying to avoid the worst but also grabbing what opportunities their predicament affords them. Violence, he finds, is never a simple reflection of the optimal strategy of its users; its profoundly interactive character defeats simple maximization logics while producing surprising outcomes, such as relative nonviolence in the 'frontlines' of civil war.

Explaining Support for Combatants during Wartime: A Survey Experiment in Afghanistan

“…As a result, we are left unable to adjudicate between competing accounts or, more simply, to explain why a particular relationship exists. Kalyvas (2006) acknowledges, for example, his central independent variable, the relative distribution of combatant control, generates its effects via at least six different mechanisms, three of them attitudinal in nature . Observational data cannot tease apart these different mechanisms; only by directly measuring attitudes can the relative influence of each mechanism be determined.…”

Climate variability and conflict risk in East Africa, 1990–2009

“…Considering the specific locations of conflicts, disaggregated analysis moves beyond crude understandings of conflict that follow the country-year unit of analysis common in international relations, where conflict is coded in binary (one or zero) terms for the entire territory of a country and a complete 1 y. The coarse resolution of the country-year approach cannot capture the dramatic location-specific differences that characterize political violence across a country (13,14); configuring statistical models to include subnational locations has called these country-level findings into question (12).…”

Security Sector Reform, Statebuilding and Local Ownership: Securing the State or its People?

“…It also needs to be genuinely acknowledged that sustainable peace is unlikely if there is limited engagement of those who will determine if peace prevails and those who will suffer if it does not. As highlighted by Kalyvas (2006) and Odendaal (2013), agency is multiple and dispersed in conflict and it follows that it should be similarly so in peacebuilding. Consequently, whether or not peace can flourish depends upon a complex relationship between elites at the statelevel and those at the community level.…”