Kalyvas (2006) The logic of Civil War

I highly highly recommend this book. Read it on your next vacation :) Actually maybe just on the plane ride to your vacation....

I am in love with this 700 page master piece. I love this book..probably for all the wrong reasons but I love love it. I know it is big and there are LOTS and LOTS of footnotes but I beg you to read them because you will learn something. This book taught me that there is always some great research around the corner and so I should always keep my eyes open as I travel the world, the city, the state whatever and open to learning. Kalyvas had to leave the US for two years due to some visa issue and found himself back home in Greece. I bet he was thinking Ohh crap what am I going to do. If it was me,  I would be thinking this is the end. Anyway, he got started on a project on studying the logic of civil war. Seriously, there is logic to civil war. I always thought it was just a bunch of people going at it or maybe for the diamonds. 

As some of you know I was born and raised in the beautiful country of Zimbabwe. What you might not know is that I spent half of my life at a tiny boarding school in Marondera..a farming city about 50K’s or so outside of Harare. Waddilove like many missionary schools during the chimurenga/ independence wars was a hot spot for both the rebels and Rhodesian forces. For the rebels it was a great place to recruit young men and women into the fight across the border in Mozambique and for the Rhodesian forces what better way to instill fear than by terrorizing teachers on the gov. payroll.  I don’t think either group was much nicer to the community but in the villages we always heard stories bout boys who went over and never came back. Girls who worked for both the rebels and Rhodesians. I actually think a lot more work needs to be done on the role of women in civil wars. But I digress… Naturally because of my years at Waddi I have become a civil war junkie…why the violence ????

The argument: Violence in a civil war is determined by the level of control that actors have on the regions. The more control that a group has the more they will use selective violence whereby they target certain individuals for some information that they want- think cutting people’s limbs short vs. long sleeve. When they have very little control they might use indiscriminate violence (burning an entire village just because they can) or to send a message to the nearby villages that they will kill them if they don’t switch sides.

At the same time citizens are also using actors for their own good. US soldiers in Iraq retell stories of being sent goose chases because neighbors are upset with each other over women or unpaid debts. Civilians are not always innocent victims in civil wars (rather sad don’t you think).

Violence is going to be highest in no man’s land. As both groups try to gain control they will use a lot of violence to do so.

After much bubbling here is the review:

Kalyvas examines the dynamics of internal wars by focusing on the micro level and by differentiating between the broad concept of civil war and the phenomenon of civil war violence. He shows that violence in a civil war can neither be reduced to irrational factors, such as strong emotions or illogical behavior, nor to pre-existing ideological cleavages. On the contrary, violence against civilians has its own rationale and logic.

Kalyvas attempts to find answers to three puzzles the variation in brutality, why civil war is violent and why previous studies have simply used endogenous explanations for civil war. The book has two goals: to build a theory of irregular war and micro foundational theory of violence. Kalyvas presents civil war as an exogenous shock (counter to traditional explanations)  and deals with violence as a dependent variable. His theory breaks civil war violence down into two basic categories. Indiscriminate violence is executed en masse without regard for the actions or preferences of individuals. In contrast, selective violence describes aggression directed towards individuals who are targeted based on specific information about their actions. Following this trend he sees violence as a rational act on both the part of the perpetrator and civilians. For him, violence is the end product of many individual rational actions by political actors and civilians, who work to fulfill their interests within a given territorial space. More specifically, Kalyvas argues that actors are aware that despite the effort and planning that goes into discriminate violence, it often proves to be counterproductive.  The rewards are little and unsatisfying. When armed groups in a civil war realize that that the incentives fostered by indiscriminate violence are against their interests, they replace it with selective violence. Although it is more expensive they are more likely to gain benefits from using selective versus indiscriminate violence.

His theory also suggests that violence is more likely to be used as a tool in contested areas than in controlled regions. In controlled regions that opposing side is aware that it will cost a lot more to change the hearts and minds of the people than in a contested area. It is also possible that the social networks in controlled areas are much stronger than those in contested areas were people are less likely to trust each other.  According to Kalyvas, the logic of violence unfolds as follows: the irregular warfare of civil war enables contenders to meddle and hide among the civilians. Hiding produces uncertainty and causes identification and communication problems. To overcome these obstacles, the competitors use violence to encourage active participation and denunciations from oppressed civilians. The stronger the actor’s control of the area, the higher the rate of collaboration and denunciations. Also, the higher the control, the less likely it is that the actor would resort to violence. Perhaps most controversially, Kalyvas predicts that the parity of control between the actors ‘is likely to produce no selective violence by any actors’ (p. 204).

A particularly enlightening argument in this book as to do with the role of civilians previously thought of as innocent victims caught in the crossfire. He argues that civilians will sometimes use violence for their own purposes in particular for revenge.  His argument intrigues me partly because I went to school in a part of the country that was both a guerilla stronghold and Rhodesian stronghold in Marondera, Zimbabwe during the second liberation struggle. Kalyvas’ explanations shed light on the relations between peasant women and both the Rhodesian and Guerilla forces. The women cooked for the guerillas and waited on the Rhodesian forces all at the same time. Conventional arguments on civil war to be very dichotomous the villains and the heroes, the innocent and the guilty, bad and good and yet the real scene of war is not so easily understood. The victims can themselves become perpetrators of violence or the perpetrators of violence are actually innocent civilians caught in between crossfire and have no choice but to kill.

It is also interesting that we always think of villagers as innocent victims and yet they are living in a war zone and obviously opinions about the war. It is interesting that the US army in Vietnam never considered how the villagers might feel about their presence in their country and the fact that they were losing children and family members everyday because of the war. But how does one conceptualize and operationalize violence that steams from revenge. I think revenge is probably a bigger driving force in the maintenance of most civil wars. I think it also creates the sense of helplessness where people feel as though it does not matter what they they could still get killed. This also feeds into collaboration people will probably just end up doing whatever ensures their safety the most without regard to the actual causes of war or maybe there really don’t know the causes of war to begin with. The same logic can be applied to collaboration any tense political environment, during the 2007 elections in Sierra Leone youth in rural areas killed people over rice not because this was somehow tied to the politicians but because they wanted the benefits i.e. rice. As Wilkinson argued politicians can unleash violence if they think that it will benefit them or their party and I think civilian participants will also choose sides based on the potential benefits.

The main weakness in the book is that although the theory is focused on civil wars, his testing is based on the foreign occupation of Greece during the World War II. He justifies his case selection by arguing that his case falls within the fairly broad definitions of civil war but I think he risks conceptual stretching. Furthermore, though the theory focuses on explaining the incidence of selective violence, this accounts for only half of the homicides in Kalyvas’ dataset (see Table 9.2 on p. 267). This suggests that indiscriminate violence deserves greater attention, even if it is harder to gain leverage on both theoretically and empirically. The book is well structured, the road maps are clear; I have never seen a better written book.