LAUSR

I nquiry into the logic of violence within civil wars is now one of the most theoretically rich fields within political science. The gruesome details of civil war violence have long captivated observers as examples of humans at their very worst, from Thucydides’ account of the Corcyrean civil war in 427 BC, which produced intracommunal conflict so vicious that “words changed their meaning,” to the Rwandan genocide at the end of the twentieth century that pitted neighbor against neighbor in unspeakable acts of cruelty (Fujii 2009). Responding to the documented shift in violence globally from interstate to intrastate conflict after the Cold War, some of the most challenging recent work in the field has focused on why combatants target non-combatants during civil wars. The primary methodological innovation of the past two decades in this research program has involved a shift from macro-level explanations for patterns of civil war violence to accounts that draw on meso(community) and micro(individual) level data (Finkel and Straus 2012; King 2011). Within civil wars, some towns and villages become sites of pogroms, sexual violence, and mass shootings, while others remain relatively quiescent. What accounts for this variation? Moving to the communal level allows us to hold national-level causes constant, to leverage local variation to support or refute rival hypotheses, and to limit the pitfalls of relying on macro-level indicators that “may aggregate local cleavages in misleading ways” (Kalyvas 2006, p. 370). The books under review make important and original contributions to this literature. Both focus on the communal and individual determinants of violence against non-combatants and remind us that violence is jointly produced by a combination of forces external and internal to the community. But Laia Balcells is a political scientist and Max Bergholz is a historian, and it should not surprise us that they approach the question of violence from different vantage points, with different tools, with different ambitions, and different expectations. Among political scientists, the standard accounts of violence within civil wars highlight economic (Zhukov 2016), organizational (Weinstein 2006), and/or military factors (Kalyvas 2006) to account for the pattern of civilian deaths. Laia Balcells, however, directs our attention to something different: 1) political divides that antedate the war, sometimes by years, and 2) the emotion-driven desire for revenge unleashed as the conflict intensifies. Taken together, these factors, she maintains, account for the spatial and temporal patterns of civilian deaths better than the available alternatives. The conflicts she studies are important in their own right—the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) and the protracted civil conflict in Cote d’Ivoire (2002–11)—but also provide her with the data she needs to develop and test a theory that is applicable well beyond these cases. Good social science starts with clear concepts, and Balcells tells us that different kinds of civil wars should produce different patterns of violence. The focus of Rivalry and Revenge is what she terms “conventional civil wars” (p. 24) in which the front lines are clearly drawn, the war is waged from stable positions, and the outcome is determined in major battles. In both Spain and Cote d’Ivoire, two sides competed for military control over territory, and once they controlled territory they controlled the local population. Balcells conceives of two kinds of violence that are distinguished by how they are produced. Direct violence is carried out at close quarters, usually with light weaponry (guns, knives, and machetes), and is jointly produced by armed groups and civilians. That is, for armed groups to carry out direct violence against enemies in territory they have captured, they require the cooperation of local Jeffrey Kopstein is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine.