Transnational Dynamics of Civil War

Description

Civil wars are the dominant form of violence in the contemporary international system, yet they are anything but local affairs. This book explores the border-crossing features of such wars by bringing together insights from international relations theory, sociology, and transnational politics with a rich comparative-quantitative literature. It highlights the causal mechanisms - framing, resource mobilization, socialization, among others - that link the international and transnational to the local, emphasizing the methods required to measure them. Contributors examine specific mechanisms leading to particular outcomes in civil conflicts ranging from Chechnya, to Afghanistan, to Sudan, to Turkey. Transnational Dynamics of Civil War thus provides a significant contribution to debates motivating the broader move to mechanism-based forms of explanation, and will engage students and researchers of international relations, comparative politics, and conflict processes.

Jeffrey T. Checkel is Professor of International Studies and Simons Chair in International Law and Human Security at Simon Fraser University and Research Professor in the Centre for the Study of Civil War at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). He has published extensively in leading European and North American journals and is the author of Ideas and International Political Change: Soviet/Russian Behavior and the End of the Cold War (1997), editor of International Institutions and Socialization in Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and co-editor (with Peter J. Katzenstein) of European Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

'Jeff Checkel has assembled an excellent group of authors with on-the-ground expertise on civil wars and sensibility to standards of social-science method and research design. [This] book should enjoy a wide readership of scholars of civil war and students taking courses on international relations, transnationalism, and civil conflict.' Matthew Evangelista, Cornell University 'Featuring the workings of various causal mechanisms, this volume contributes invaluably to our understanding of dynamic processes at work during civil war.' Scott Gates, Director, Centre for the Study of Civil War, Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) 'With more than half of all post-1945 civil wars spilling across state borders, this new volume offers a welcome introduction into the often overlooked transnational dynamics of 'local' wars. Taken as a whole, these chapters also provide compelling evidence for the importance of qualitative process-tracing that moves beyond just-so stories to the much tougher challenge of rigorously testing the mechanisms that underpin our explanations of civil war dynamics.' Jason Lyall, Yale University