The Logic of Violence in Civil War

I bought Kalyvas’s book back in 2009 as a doctoral student looking to understand the social science literature on civil war violence and finished reading it only in 2023 as an associate professor interested in studying target choice for a class I was teaching.

Though singularly focused on civil wars, the book goes deep in constructing theoretical arguments to support the premise of the book and travels broad in applying the models across various civil wars. It teaches readers to look beneath the surface to understand what we observe on the outside.

It is a great resource for those looking… show more.

Inter- and intrastate war are commonplace. News media play up the human drama and transmit the impression that much war is irrational, and that violence is dished out indiscriminately.

Scholars have long since discarded the notion of irrationality of and in warfare. Nonetheless, in their studies of the causes, conduct, and consequences of violence, they tend to treat violence itself as an unexamined entity. Enter Kalyvas who, in this book, disassembles violence into its components, much like natural scientists have disassembled molecules into atoms and atoms into subatomic particles.

With the constituent elements in hand, Kalyvas then proceeds to build… show more.