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The primacy of territorial control in theories of civil war has advanced our understanding of war dynamics, most notably lethal violence, but has hindered our understanding of the distinct ways in which armed groups seek control over people. We propose to complement territorial control by separately conceptualising social control, which we define as the extent to which armed groups have access to people and their resources. Access to people requires different tactics compared to access to territory, because people are mobile. We develop a framework in which state and non-state armed groups choose whether to prioritise territorial or social control first in order to gain sovereignty, which requires both territorial and social control. Alternatively, armed groups choose to pursue territorial control or social control only, resulting in corridors or social networks, respectively. We illustrate the advantages of the framework by showing how it allows us to analyse armed groups' tactics to control access to people, to connect research agendas on armed group violence, governance, and civilian displacement, and to better conceptualise armed group power and strength.

Militias are an empirical phenomenon that has been overlooked by current research on civil war. Yet, it is a phenomenon that is crucial for understanding political violence, civil war, post-conflict politics, and authoritarianism. Militias or paramilitaries are armed groups that operate alongside regular security forces or work independently of the state to shield the local population from insurgents. We review existing uses of the term, explore the range of empirical manifestations of militias, and highlight recent findings, including those supplied by the articles in this special issue. We focus on areas where the recognition of the importance of militias challenges and complements current theories of civil war. We conclude by introducing a research agenda advocating the integrated study of militias and rebel groups.

Corinna Jentzsch, Stathis N. Kalyvas, and Livia Isabella Schubiger, Militias in Civil Wars 755-769. - Paul Staniland, Militias, Ideology, and the State 770-793. - Ben Oppenheim, Abbey Steele, Juan F. Vargas, and Michael Weintraub, True Believers, Deserters, and Traitors: Who Leaves Insurgent Groups and Why 794-823. - Jonathan Filip Forney, Who Can We Trust with a Gun? Information Networks and Adverse Selection in Militia Recruitment 824-849. - Sabine C. Carey, Michael P. Colaresi, and Neil J. Mitchell, Governments, Informal Links to Militias, and Accountability 850-876. - Dara Kay Cohen and Ragnhild Nordås, Do States Delegate Shameful Violence to Militias? Patterns of Sexual Violence in Recent Armed Conflicts 877-898. - Jessica A. Stanton, Regulating Militias: Governments, Militias, and Civilian Targeting in Civil War 899-923. - Kristine Eck, Repression by Proxy: How Military Purges and Insurgency Impact the Delegation of Coercion 924-946

"Managing Internationalized Civil Wars" published on by Oxford University Press.

A notable feature of post-World War II civil wars is their very long average duration. We provide a theory of the persistence of civil wars. The civilian government can successfully defeat rebellious factions only by creating a relatively strong army. In weakly-institutionalized polities this opens the way for excessive influence or coups by the military. Civilian governments whose rents are largely unaffected by civil wars then choose small and weak armies that are incapable of ending insurrections. Our framework also shows that when civilian governments need to take more decisive action against rebels, they may be forced to build over-sized armies, beyond the size necessary for fighting the insurrection, as a commitment to not reforming the military in the future.

"Jihadist Governance in Civil Wars" published on by Oxford University Press.

"Civil Wars and Displacement" published on by Oxford University Press.

An Introduction to Civil Wars takes an empirical and thematic approach to the study of civil wars. Since World War II, by far most of the wars that have been fought are civil wars--wars between groups within states, like Darfur, Somalia, Congo, Kosovo, and Chechnya--and not wars between sovereign states. The book is organized thematically to address major topics and findings on civil wars, including causes, duration, recurrence, termination, intervention, post-conflict problems, civilian victimization/terrorism, and resource-related issues. Cases at the end of chapters spotlight specific civil wars

Some of the most brutal and long-lasting civil wars of our time involve the rapid formation and disintegration of alliances among warring groups, as well as fractionalization within them. It would be natural to suppose that warring groups form alliances based on shared identity considerations - such as Christian groups allying with Christian groups - but this is not what we see. Two groups that identify themselves as bitter foes one day, on the basis of some identity narrative, might be allies the next day and vice versa. Nor is any group, however homogeneous, safe from internal fractionalization. Rather, looking closely at the civil wars in Afghanistan and Bosnia and testing against the broader universe of fifty-three cases of multiparty civil wars, Fotini Christia finds that the relative power distribution between and within various warring groups is the primary driving force behind alliance formation, alliance changes, group splits and internal group takeovers.

"This book argues that relative power balances, rather than shared identities, explain why combatant groups in the Afghan civil wars constantly aligned with and double-crossed each other, and develops a theory on alliance formation and group fractionalization in multiparty civil wars"--