LAUSR

the balance of military control as an alternative explanation for local violence, he treats contestation between armed actors as being orthogonal to civilian collective action capacity. If civilians are concerned primarily with mitigating risk to their long-term personal safety, the optimal strategy in some contexts may be to provide active and unified support to one of the sides. Doing so may tip the military balance of power and allow one side to establish dominant military control, a situation that is highly conducive to preventing violent acts against civilians (Stathis Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, 2006). Examples of this dynamic appear to be present in some of the book’s case studies. For example, Kaplan states, “ATCC civilian leaders were able to brush off the dominant paramilitaries’ efforts to install a base in the town of La India by arguing that it would only cause them more problems with the guerrillas” (p. 193). With this question aside, ResistingWarmakes a pioneering contribution to the study of civil conflict and insurgency. Kaplan’s book is an exemplary piece of research that provides a captivating and rigorous telling of how civilians in conflict zones protect their own safety. In a context where scholars increasingly view civilian behavior as being crucial to armed actors’ military success (see Eli Berman, Jacob Shapiro, and Joseph Felter, Small Wars, Big Data, 2019), Kaplan presents a sophisticated and transformative understanding of civilians’ actual incentives and available actions. The powerful combination of broad and deep evidence presented in support of this highly nuanced theory is a tremendous accomplishment, and the resulting piece of work should have broad appeal to a range of disciplines.