2 Items

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Journal Article - Journal of Conflict Resolution

Sovereignty Rupture as a Central Concept in Quantitative Measures of Civil War

| May 27, 2019

Empirical studies of the causes or consequences of civil war often use measures that do not correspond to theory and results are sensitive to small changes in the coding of civil wars. Civil war is an instance of “sovereignty rupture” and is inherently a polity-level phenomenon, but that understanding of civil war is not reflected in data in which civil war is coded as a dyadic conflict—the state fighting a domestic challenger. We demonstrate the consequences of conceptual ambiguity about which conflicts to code as civil war and when to code the start and end of a civil war. Using a new data set of civil wars from 1945 to 2016 that is consistent with the concept of sovereignty rupture, we replicate several studies and find that their results are often overturned or weakened when we use our data. We advocate for greater deliberateness in data selection in civil war studies, focusing on the fit between the question of interest and the concept of civil war that is underlying a given data set.

(AP Photo/File)

(AP Photo/File)

Journal Article - Perspectives on Politics

Syria, Productive Antinomy, and the Study of Civil War

| December 2018

Review Essay: Civil War in Syria: Mobilization and Competing Social Orders. By Adam Baczko, Gilles Dorronsoro, and Arthur Quesnay. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 336p. $84.99 cloth, $27.99 paper.

The horrors of the ongoing Syrian civil war have never been far from the front pages of the news. Social scientists who wish to study it soon confront the awkward reality that the war’s ferocity precludes field research on its central military and political dynamics. Scholars have made important advances in studying mechanisms behind protest activity and the mobilization of armed opposition to the al-Assad regime, but much work is confined to studying the conflict through the lens of refugees. Adam Baczko, Gilles Dorronsoro, and Arthur Quesnay’s research is all the more indispensable for that context. Scholars of civil war and of autocracies, researchers investigating the 2011 Arab uprisings, and Syria specialists all will find value in their book’s rich pairing of theoretically-driven analysis and empirical material gathered through field research in Syria.