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Focusing on the explosion of civil wars since 1945, Bill Kissane asks what makes the contemporary challenge posed by civil wars different to that of past periods - and looks at what the insights from the historical literature, going back to the ancient Greeks, can add to our understanding of this tragic phenomenon

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Civil war has been a recurring feature of human societies throughout history - and an essential catalyst for major international conflict. And since 1945 the number of civil wars in the world has grown steadily, bringing devastation on a scale more traditionally associated with international wars.

In spite of this, there is no classic treatise on civil war to compare with the classic works we have on war, revolution, or peace. On the one hand, historians have tended to treat the ´big´ civil wars such as the American and the Spanish in isolation. On the other, social scientists have concentrated on identifying common patterns, without looking in too much detail at the specifics of any given conflict.

Focusing on the numerous civil conflicts that have occurred throughout the world since the Second World War, Bill Kissane bridges this gap, asking what the recent social science literature adds to what we already know about civil war, but also how insights from the historical literature, from the ancient Greeks onwards, can help explain the violent experience of so many parts of the world since 1945.

At its heart is the question of what makes the contemporary challenge posed by civil war so different to that of past periods - and what, if anything, is new about the contemporary experience of civil war at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

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Nations Torn Asunder should become an essential guidebook for those willing take up Kissane´s challenge. Jacob Mundy, Civil Wars

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A political scientist and historian, Bill Kissane is a Reader in Politics at the London School of Economics, where he is a member of the Conflict Research Group. He is the author of several books on civil-war related subjects, including a pioneering study of the Irish civil war, The Politics of the Irish Civil War (2005), also published by Oxford University Press, and has held visiting positions at University College Dublin, the University of Notre Dame, the
University of Bielefeld, and the National Humanities Centre in North Carolina.

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