The Logic of Violence in Civil War

"Yes, in picking five books on the war in Afghanistan, I chose three books on Afghanistan and two on conflict itself. The reason I chose this book is that it had a revolutionary effect on the way social scientists think about civil wars in general. Prior to the publication of this book, social science literature viewed political allegiance and loyalty in civil wars as being primarily exogenous. You have a loyalty, you stick with that loyalty, that’s who you are, that’s what defines you during the conflict. This book challenges that notion. In terms of the conflict itself, what concerns both an insurgent or a counterinsurgent, or the parties to a civil war, is really behaviour. How do you behave during the conflict? And if you look at the way populations behave throughout civil wars, whether or not they collaborate, and who they collaborate with, is largely determined by who controls that population. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . This book had a revolutionary effect. Some would argue that Kalyvas goes too far in arguing that loyalty is all endogenous and that he glosses over things like religious identity and tribal identity. But, in general, if you’re trying to predict how a population is going to behave, you’ll be more successful if you look at what party or combatant controls a certain area or part of the population than what the pre-war political preferences are. That has direct policy implications. If you’re trying to create collaboration within a certain area, you know that you have to exert control over the population, you can’t take for granted a person’s political loyalty. By the same token, you can’t just write off a population. One of the things we saw in Iraq is that in areas where the US military was able to surge, you started to see rates of collaboration go up. You started to see concerned local citizens, you started to see people joining police forces. Part of the logic of the US campaign design in Afghanistan was underpinned by these observations about the way populations behave in civil wars. Yes. Kalyvas writes that the higher the level of control exercised by a political actor in an area, the higher the level of civilian collaboration with this political actor will be. Populations in civil wars are basically trying to survive. They’ll do this in a number of different ways: They’ll survive by hedging, they’ll survive by swinging back and forth between different factions, they’ll survive by autarchy (“A pox on both your houses – I’m just living for myself!”). Their goal is just to survive. Both the insurgent and the counterinsurgent or the various parties to the civil war actually need the population to do something different. They need them to take sides. At the very least, they need them to start supporting the institutions of the state that are necessary in order to defeat the insurgency, like joining the police forces, for example. We’ve seen that in Afghanistan. The more the counterinsurgent forces are able to exert control over an area, the more collaboration with counterinsurgency forces go up. So have we seen The Logic of Violence in Civil War play out in Afghanistan? Yes, I think we have. The two questions are, is this drop in violence sustainable and is it worth it? Maybe not. It’s only sustainable if those counterinsurgent forces, which are predominantly US and allied, can be replaced by Afghan security forces. In a place like Helmand province, for example, the US has invested billions of dollars. The overall question of whether or not that expenditure was worth it is ultimately a political question."