Citation

Kalyvas SN. Terrorism Polit. Violence 2012; 24(4): 658-668.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2012, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/09546553.2012.701986

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The article reviews recent advances in the study of violence in civil wars. It provides a brief description of the baseline "control-collaboration" model, discusses alternatives to it, and reviews recent empirical studies that supply additions, corrections, extensions, and refinements to the baseline model. It highlights some of the assumptions that can be relaxed based on this new research, including the following ones: that in civil war context information is produced exclusively or even primarily by civilian denunciations at the local level; that violence is only used to deter civilian defection; that conflict is always locally dyadic; and that rival factions are organizationally indistinct from each other and resort to similar repertoires of violence. These refinements and extensions have the potential to produce a novel set of predictions that can be tested against both existing and new data. The essay notes the dynamism of this research program and recommends two steps for future research. First, it recommends moving to a higher-level, empirical and theoretical synthesis, by relying on the growing corpus of empirical studies and exploring scope conditions in a much more systematic way than was possible previously. Second, it recommends scaling up the findings of micro-level, subnational studies to the meso and macro-levels, by deriving novel empirical implications and testing them.