Varieties of post-civil war violence

Shaw, D. O. and Wedgwood Young, E. (2021) Varieties of post-civil war violence. Violence: An International Journal, 2(2), pp. 227-252. (doi: 10.1177/26330024211039864)

Abstract

Quantitative research on the “durability” of peace following civil wars typically captures the breakdown or survival of “peace” in a binary manner, equating it with the presence or absence of civil war recurrence. In the datasets that underpin such studies, years that do not experience full-scale civil war are implicitly coded as “peaceful.” Yet, post-civil war environments may remain free from war recurrence, while nevertheless experiencing endemic violent crime, state repression, low-intensity political violence, and systematic violence against marginalized groups, all of which are incongruent with the concept of peace. Approaches to assessing post-civil war outcomes which focus exclusively on civil war recurrence risk overestimating the “durability” of peace, implicitly designating as “peaceful” a range of environments which may be anything but. In this article, we discuss the heterogeneity of violent post-civil war outcomes and develop a typology of “varieties of post-civil war violence.” Our typology contributes to the study of post-civil war peace durability, by serving as the basis for an alternative, categorical conceptualization of “peace years” in conflict datasets.

• Item Type: Articles
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Shaw, Mr Daniel and Wedgwood Young, Enrique
• Authors: Shaw, D. O., and Wedgwood Young, E.
• College/School: College of Social Sciences > School of Social and Political Sciences
• Journal Name: Violence: An International Journal
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• ISSN: 2633-0024
• ISSN (Online): 2633-0032
• Published Online: 13 November 2021
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2021 The Authors
• First Published: First published in Violence: An International Journal 2(2): 227-252
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a Creative Commons License

Project Code	Award No	Project Name	Principal Investigator	Funder's Name	Funder Ref	Lead Dept
303166		Scottish Graduate School Science Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP)	Mary Beth Kneafsey	Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)	ES/P000681/1	SS - Academic & Student Administration