This chapter reviews existing accounts of violence and civil war and clarifies definitional and conceptual issues related to both civil war and violence. I make the case for the analytical autonomy of violence vis-à-vis conflict and introduce three important distinctions: between violence and violent conflict, between violence as an outcome and as a process, and between violence in peace and violence in war.

CIVIL WAR

Civil war has attracted considerable scholarly attention from various disciplines – though considerably less than interstate war. Important bodies of literature have explicitly or implicitly (as studies of revolution, rebellion, or ethnic conflict) focused on numerous aspects: onset (Fearon and Laitin 2003; Collier et al. 2003; Sambanis and Elbadawi 2002; Gurr 1980), resolution (B. Walter 1997), social bases (Wickham-Crowley 1992; Skocpol 1979), outcome (Leites and Wolf 1970), political and social consequences (Sambanis 2000), and processes of rebuilding, reconciliation, and postwar justice (Bass 2000; Nino 1996). A recent boom in civil war studies has been fueled by the global shift from interstate to intrastate conflict: of the 118 armed conflicts that have taken place between 1989 and 2004, only 7 have been interstate wars (Harbom and Wallensteen 2005).