Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - CIVILWARS (Social Dynamics of Civil Wars)

Teaser

Each year, civil wars cause hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of injuries and massive destruction. Displacement is consubstantial to these conflicts, the millions of refugees that pour into neighbouring countries create regional instabilities. To the immediate cost...

Summary

Each year, civil wars cause hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of injuries and massive destruction. Displacement is consubstantial to these conflicts, the millions of refugees that pour into neighbouring countries create regional instabilities. To the immediate cost, counted in trillions of euros (destruction, refugees, emergency aid, peace-keeping), must be added the indirect costs - ecological disruption, the destruction of historic sites, chaotic urbanisation, the transformation of land structures - which shatter the futures of societies for decades to come, well beyond the end of the conflicts themselves.

Although located in areas perceived as out of the way, civil wars engage not only the founding principles of international order, but the very internal organisation of our societies. Indeed, civil wars, just like social margins, are laboratories of new political technologies that can be implemented elsewhere (Tullis 1999, Kraska 2001). Civil wars, without foreshadowing a common future, can be considered indicators or accelerators of global trends such as electronic surveillance, privatisation of essential Governmental functions, or security-centred approaches to social issues. Finally, whether through migration, individual engagements or the media, these wars contribute to the redefinition and the radicalisation of identity divides. For instance, the rising rejection of Islam in Western countries or the Shia/Sunni conflicts in the Middle East are at least in part the result of civil wars.

In addition, since the end of the Cold War, civil wars represent almost the totality of conflicts. They affect mostly States that are ethnically diverse. These wars have a distinctly transnational character: armed organisations have in most cases a sanctuary in a neighbouring country and non-military external actors (IOs, NGOs) intervene on both sides of the border. They rarely lead to a change in international borders; annexation, a rare event, is almost never recognised internationally today; secessions remain infrequent (Atzili 2012; Zacher 2001). In the end, the territories are more stable than the States. Contrary to the Elias\' model, where the political centre defines its territorial control, borders are today largely stable due to international constraints. Rather, what is at stake in war is generally the control or neutralisation of the political centre. Even if they have little chance of success, the opposite dynamic, genuinely transnational (Rwanda-Democratic Republic of Congo in the 1990s or Syria-Iraq in 2014), is even more interesting to analyse, as these situations offer a contrario insight into the dominant logic.

The structural similarities of contemporary civil wars suggest the possibility of a theoretical model based on a comparative approach. However, as some authors have noted, social sciences are struggling to understand extreme situations. These events are conceptually fertile, since the violent rupture of the daily routines makes visible, through contrast, the very foundations of social order. Consequently, the study of civil wars opens up promising avenues for general sociology and political thought more broadly.

Work performed

\"In accordance with the Grand agreement, the establishment of a research program necessitates the formation of an interdisciplinary team of young researchers (Junior Research Fellows) in sociology, political science, history and anthropology, which was progressively set up over the course of the first 30 months of the project, without precluding the possibility of further recruitment over the remaining 30 months of the project.

First, the program’s plan of action aims to create a favorable environment for scientific innovation based on solid, regular, and face-to-face interaction. One such event - the “Social Dynamics of Civil Wars” seminar – is divided into two separate formats: a weekly seminar open to the public and a closed-door half-day workshop addressing fieldwork experiences and corpus studies. Foreign researchers have regularly been invited to attend in order to foster the creation of a European network. It helped to add value to the project’s initial results in order to develop partnerships in Europe.

Through the case-based approach of the team, each team member has been able to compare their personal research to various case studies (Mali, Turkey, Lebanon, South Sudan, Ivory Coast, Congo, Syria, Afghanistan and Mexico), thereby gaining a better understanding of both the specific features of their own cases and of the features that the cases have in common, and this is opening up further questions. This approach has helped to improve the conceptualisation of the programme, especially our definition of contemporary civil wars, the international dimensions of civil wars, the specific features of civil wars compared to other situations of extreme violence, and the social orders built by the armed factions.
It led to the publication in 2017 of an updated version of a conceptual paper in the “Revue française de science politique”, under the programmatic title “For a sociological approach to civil wars”.
The book “Civil War in Syria” published by Cambridge University Press has enabled Gilles Dorronsoro, Arthur Quesnay and Adam Baczko to present their theoretical framework to a larger audience and propose an accompanying case study.

Highly specialised groups of ERC students and non-salaried young researchers have been set up. They have been actively integrated into the ERC’s thematic areas of research, including the “Regional dynamics of the Kurdish question” discussion group. Thematic study days have been held in Paris to examine the potential options for authoring articles and collective publications.

In a similar vein, the thematic discussion group \"\"Mexico - Central America\"\" (MXAC) held a major international meeting to examine situations of extreme violence that display a number of similarities to civil wars. The starting points for the group discussion, led by members of the ERC project alongside Latin-American researchers, were the extent of loss of human life, the level and forms of violence observed, and population displacement.

One of the areas of research being studied by the ERC Civil Wars project is the reshaping of the fields of cultural production in times of civil war. A programme paper entitled \"\"Divisions of meaning. Cultural producers and politicisation of culture in civil wars\"\" was produced in June 2017.

In 2018, ERC Civil Wars opened up its field of research to cover conflicts in the post-Soviet region, which are of major comparative interest for studying war onset conditions, their impacts on social structures, on capitals and on the relationships between social fields.

As originally planned, the ERC project of comparative sociology of civil wars must draw on extensive fieldwork. The PI favored perimeters of investigation including countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Turkey, Mali, Côte d\'Ivoire, Lebanon, Algeria and Ukraine. The inclusion of conflicts in Latin America and in sub- Saharan Africa was supposed to test the theoretical propositions in different cultura\"

Final results

The findings of the research conducted as part of the ERC were presented to a specialist audience during the biennial conference of our European programme.
In reaction to what appears reductionist in the dominant paradigm that still prevails in the literature on the subject, the ERC Civil Wars programme seeks to define civil war as the violent coexistence of social orders.
This approach focuses on three questions that form the building blocks of our programme, the aim of which is to produce an alternative paradigm.
These three questions relate to the following phenomena seen in civil wars: the fluctuations in relative values of capitals, the emergence of competing institutional systems producing alternative social orders and, finally, the transformation of individual dispositions and decision-making processes.
The end result of project planning is to organize an important final conference of the EU-funded ERC Civil Wars project in July 2020. We will assemble together over a period of a few days the core team members, associate junior research fellows who have contributed to the project and eminent researchers and experts in Civil Wars.
The publication of the collective books produced by the thematic discussion groups is also a top priority for the next 30 months:
1) Study of theoretical nature “The outbreak of war / Paths to Civil War”
2) Study of comparative nature: “Regional dynamics of the Kurdish question”
3) Study of comparative nature: “Configurations of Violence in Mexico and Central America”
4) Comparative historical analysis: “Cultural producers and the politicisation of culture in civil wars”.

Website & more info

More info: https://civilwars.eu/.