The Logic of Violence in Civil War is a book which challenges the conventional view of violence in civil wars as irrational. The book presents a theory for levels of violence, as well as why selective violence (targeting individuals) and indiscriminate violence (targeting collectives) are at varying times employed in civil wars. He argues that higher levels of violence happen in territory under near-hegemonic rule (one group has overwhelming but incomplete dominance), as opposed to completely fragmented territory (no group has control) or fully controlled territory. He argues that violence will tend towards being indiscriminate in territory under fragmented control but be selective in territory under near-hegemonic control.
The book offers a methodologically individualist account of civil wars that focuses on instrumental action by rational individuals. The book therefore focuses on the micro foundations of war, rather on the macro aspects of civil war that are dominant in the political violence literature.
The author, Stathis N. Kalyvas (born 1964), is a political scientist known for his analysis of the dynamics of polarization and civil war, ethnic and non-ethnic violence, and the formation of cleavages and identities. He has also researched party politics and political institutions in Europe. He is a professor at the University of Oxford. In 2020, Scott Straus described the book as "one of the most influential in the field" of political violence.
Background
According to Kalyvas, he struggled to convince political scientists that micro-level violence was a topic worthy of study in political science prior to the publication of the book, as the focus in the existing political science literature on violence was overwhelmingly on collective uses of violence. His early papers were rejected by political science journals.
Contents
The logic behind violence in civil wars
Since at least the French revolution, we have collected a frightening register of extremely violent events in the context of civil wars, and such apparent massive irrational behaviour among combatants and civilians (a sort of unexpected Hobbesian disease) has been widely examined by the literature. Previous works tried to insert violence as a phenomenon directly derived from the (military) logic of civil war using anecdotal accounts or cleavage-based analyses, but overlooked the fact that several manifestations of violence can be exogenous to that logic. Civil war can be an exogenous shock onto some societies that can activate invisible networks of grievances and feuds among their individuals.
Kalyvas' book is focused on explaining that this sort of violence common in civil wars, namely that violence that is significant by its number of victims, its ‘barbarism’ (or brutality) and the fact that both victims and executioners have had a peaceful performance in their past interaction (i.e. neighbours). The research tries to be confined to that kind of violence in civil wars, and the work principally provides an explanation to the spatial variance of that dependent variable. Temporal approaches are suggested, but not deeply developed in comparative terms.
As civil wars are frequently battled by means of some sort of irregular warfare by one or both contenders, Kalyvas embodies his explanation in the constraints of irregular wars, specifically the ability of competitors to hide themselves behind civilian population, and the uncertainty around who is an enemy and who is neutral in such an environment. Enemies can be hidden among the apparently supporters of a community, and contenders can only deal with such informational problems in an efficient ways by exercising violence against previously selected defectors. The efficient way of doing so is waiting for spontaneous civilian informers, an action more critical in highly competed areas, where powers are balanced and, consequently, sovereignty is fragmented. On the other hand, the probability of denunciations grows with the level of control that one side has in a given area. The more the control one side has, the risk of retaliation by the other side that informers have to face is less, but the probability of real defection and shifting to the other side is lessened also, compromising the credibility of those numerous and spontaneous informers. Political actors do not search for violence as the first-best option to prevent both shifts and defections, because they generally prefer selective, limited violence (that reduces the probability of shifts and defections by deterrence) to arbitrary, massive violence (that increases the likelihood of those outcomes).