Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables and Figures
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- The Logic of Violence in Civil War
- INTRODUCTION
- 1 CONCEPTS
- 2 PATHOLOGIES
- 3 BARBARISM
- 4 A THEORY OF IRREGULAR WAR I
- 5 A THEORY OF IRREGULAR WAR II
- 6 A LOGIC OF INDISCRIMINATE VIOLENCE
- 7 A THEORY OF SELECTIVE VIOLENCE
- 8 EMPIRICS I
- 9 EMPIRICS II
- 10 INTIMACY
- 11 CLEAVAGE AND AGENCY
- CONCLUSION
- Appendix A Data Sources
- Appendix B Coding Protocols
- Appendix C Timeline of Conflicts
- References
- Index
- Titles in the series
2 - PATHOLOGIES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables and Figures
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- The Logic of Violence in Civil War
- INTRODUCTION
- 1 CONCEPTS
- 2 PATHOLOGIES
- 3 BARBARISM
- 4 A THEORY OF IRREGULAR WAR I
- 5 A THEORY OF IRREGULAR WAR II
- 6 A LOGIC OF INDISCRIMINATE VIOLENCE
- 7 A THEORY OF SELECTIVE VIOLENCE
- 8 EMPIRICS I
- 9 EMPIRICS II
- 10 INTIMACY
- 11 CLEAVAGE AND AGENCY
- CONCLUSION
- Appendix A Data Sources
- Appendix B Coding Protocols
- Appendix C Timeline of Conflicts
- References
- Index
- Titles in the series
Summary
The dead are innocent, the killer monstrous, the surrounding politics insane or nonexistent.
Peter Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from RwandaTwenty thousand miles and four days later [U.S. officials] Krulak and Mendenhall read diametrically opposed reports [about the situation in Vietnam] to another NSC meeting at the White House. “You two did visit the same country, didn't you?” Kennedy asked. “I can explain it, Mr. President,” Krulak said. “Mr. Mendenhall visited the cities and I visited the countryside and the war is in the countryside.”
Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining LieA guiding premise of this book is that despite a great deal of academic and popular interest in violence and civil war and the lurid and tragic details associated with them, violence in civil wars remains poorly understood. Extant literature on the subject suffers from a number of pathologies rising from the manner in which violence is conceptualized and the biases brought in either by researchers themselves or by the logistics involved in studying civil war. Specifically, the study of violence in civil war must overcome at least a frequent misconceptualization, referred to here as “madness,” and five common biases: the partisan bias (taking sides), the political bias (equating war with peace), the urban bias (overlooking bottom-top processes), the selection bias (disregarding nonviolence), and the overaggregation bias (working at too high a level of abstraction).
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- The Logic of Violence in Civil War , pp. 32 - 51Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006