| Publication |
2012.
|
| Summary/Abstract |
In the 1990s, vivid accounts of atrocities committed by Sierra Leone's drug-fuelled child soldiers contributed to the portrayal of so-called 'resource wars' as some violent descent into a primordial anarchy. The academic rebuttal that inevitably followed stressed, by contrast, the very ordered nature of civil conflict, placing the rational actor at the centre of supposedly 'irrational' violence. This article nevertheless finds the rational-actor argument inadequate for explaining the most seemingly senseless acts of atrocity and calls for greater focus on expressive and psychological micro-foundations of violence in the study of civil wars.
|