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ID:
106367
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2011.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The identification of intra-national armed conflict as a leading problem for the international community in the 1990s produced a wave of novel research into civil wars. Though these new civil war studies soon began to claim a degree of consensus on several key questions, the very concept and ontology of civil war has been implicitly and explicitly contested. An examination of the politics of naming civil wars likewise reveals the extent to which varying and sometimes conflicting definitions of civil war are still in circulation among various observer types. Instead of adjudicating these disputed definitions of civil war, this article details the way in which particular conceptions of civil war produce their object of analysis. The recent Algerian conflict stands as an excellent case study in the politics of naming civil wars and the ways in which the conceptual frameworks of the new civil war studies make Algeria into a civil war. To go beyond the contested definition of civil war, the new civil war studies should not judge the viability of concepts of mass armed violence - whether civil war or so-called new wars - on their alleged coherence with particular representations of history. Concepts of mass violence should instead be judged in relation to the political goals from which they obtain their warrant in the first place.
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| 2 |
ID:
094554
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| Publication |
2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Civil wars and humanitarian intervention became two of the most dominant security concerns of the 1990s and Algeria was one of the many sites where these discourses were played out, especially during the wave of massacres that claimed the lives of hundreds (if not thousands) of Algerian civilians between mid-1997 and early 1998. The internationalization of the Algerian Civil War was driven as much by the horrific violence as by a lack of certainty as to the identity of those perpetrating the massacres. The indeterminacy of violence in Algeria provided the warrant for experts to fill the void. Yet interpretations of the violence in Algeria, coupled with the generic logics of intra-national armed conflicts and the use of international coercive force for the protection of human rights, produced divergent problematizations of the crisis. This paper thus examines the ways in which Algeria was, and often was not, produced as a civil war and a humanitarian crisis by expert and scholarly knowledge and practice. Through an analysis of the exclusionary effects of the dominant understandings of political violence in Algeria, we are able to understand the conceptual impasse that faced international action against the massacres.
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| 3 |
ID:
179887
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| 4 |
ID:
169943
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| Summary/Abstract |
For years, there has been debate as to whether or not the Middle East experiences more armed conflict – and for different reasons – than other regions in the world. Absent is any consideration of the grounds upon which such regional comparisons are possible. Rather than providing a general account of regions, this article instead provides a theory of the Middle East based on the violent practices that have made and reproduced the Middle East as a region, both materially and ideationally. Though critical of comparative approaches to the study of armed conflicts, this argument models a different way to understand them.
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| 5 |
ID:
106369
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| Publication |
2011.
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| Summary/Abstract |
While Håvard Strand's rejoinder to 'Deconstructing civil wars' is a welcome invitation to dialogue, its criticisms are grounded in a fundamental misreading of my article. Here I will attempt to address the sources of confusion, which stem from poor execution on my part and some theoretical blinders on the part of the author of the rejoinder. This response will clarify my ethical and theoretical concerns with the way in which mass intra-territorial armed violence has been studied recently, and then reinforce my proposed warrant for a pragmatic (read: political) turn in the civil war/new war debate. This intervention will conclude by suggesting that the present debate highlights the need for a third estate in political studies, one that operates between political science and political theory: politiography.
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