We discuss how three social science disciplines, economics, sociology, and political science approach history and we contrast them to history as practiced by historians. We find that the drive to identify broadly generalizable causal effects, driven by the desire to predict and shape the future (the “Delphi syndrome”), frequently prompts social scientists to use history in a way that neglects the historians’ valuable insights. At the same time, the recent methodological developments in econometric techniques that have spread through the three disciplines place enormous, often unrealistic, historical demands on social scientists. We illustrate these issues by discussing several examples and we conclude by arguing that a way ahead consists in approaching the relation between idiographic and nomothetic research principles as one that approximates a continuum rather than a dichotomy.

This volume emerged from a conference on “Order, Conflict, and Violence” held at Yale in May of 2004. It is one of a series of books to come out of the Yale Political Science Initiative on “Rethinking Political Order.” Other volumes resulting from the Initiative are Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics, edited by Ian Shapiro, Rogers Smith, and Tarek Masoud (Cambridge University Press 2004); Rethinking Political Institutions: The Art of the State, edited by Ian Shapiro, Stephen Skowronek, and Daniel Galvin (New York University Press 2006); Identities, Affiliations, and Allegiances, edited by Seyla Benhabib, Ian Shapiro, and Danilo Petranovich (Cambridge University Press 2007); Political Contingency: Studying the Unexpected, the Accidental, and the Unforeseen, edited by Ian Shapiro and Sonu Bedi (New York University Press 2007); Divide and Deal: The Politics of Distribution in Democracies, edited by Ian Shapiro, Peter Swenson, and Daniela Donno (New York University Press 2008); and Representation and Popular Rule, edited by Ian Shapiro, Susan Stokes, Elisabeth Wood, and Alexander Kirshner (in press).

We are pleased to record our gratitude to Yale University for the financial support that has made this initiative possible. Thanks are due to Sage Publications for permission to reprint Courtney Jung, Ellen Lust-Okar, and Ian Shapiro's essay, “Problems and Prospects for Democratic Settlements: South Africa as a Model for the Middle East and Northern Ireland?” which first appeared in Politics and Society 33:2 (June 2005), in the present volume.

The study of civil war ranks among the most notable developments in political science during the last decade. Several important papers have been published in this period and the field has witnessed an important shift toward cross-national, large-N econometric studies (e.g. Collier and Hoeffler 2004; Fearon and Laitin 2003), following a previous shift from the case-study format to that of theoretically informed studies (Wickham-Crowley 1992; Skocpol 1979; Scott 1976; Eckstein 1965).

However, despite these advances much remains to be understood. On the one hand, the conceptual foundations of our understanding of civil wars are still weak (Kalyvas 2001; 2003; Cramer 2002); on the other hand, econometric studies have produced very little in terms of robust results – the main one being that, like autocratic regimes (Przeworski et al. 2000), civil wars are more likely to occur in poor countries. The problems of econometric studies are well known: their main findings are incredibly sensitive to coding and measurement procedures (Hegre and Sambanis 2006; Montalvo and Reynal-Querol 2005; Sambanis 2004b); they entail a considerable distance between theoretical constructs and proxies (Cederman and Girardin 2007; Fearon et al. 2007) as well as multiple observationally equivalent pathways (Kalyvas 2007; Humphreys 2005; Kocher 2004; Sambanis 2004a); they suffer from endogeneity (Miguel et al. 2004); they lack clear microfoundations or are based on erroneous ones (Cramer 2007; Kalyvas and Kocher 2007b; Gutiérrez Sanín 2004); and, finally, they are subject to narrow (and untheorized) scope conditions (Wimmer and Min 2006).

There might appear to be little that binds the study of order and the study of violence and conflict. Bloodshed in its multiple forms – interstate war, civil conflict, crime – is often seen as something separate from, and almost unrelated to, the domains of “normal” politics that constitute what we think of as order. Students of political, social, and economic institutions simply assume that violence is absent and order established, never considering that the maintenance of such institutions might involve the ongoing management of conflict and the more or less direct threat of violence. Likewise, students of violence and conflict tend to focus on places and periods in which order has collapsed, rarely considering how violence is used to create order at the national and local levels, maintain it, and uphold it in the face of challenges. In Charles Tilly's (1975, 42) famous formulation: war makes states. Clearly, order is necessary for managing violence as much as the threat of violence is crucial in cementing order.

Yet the question of how order emerges and how it is sustained is but the flip side of understanding the dynamics of conflict. On the one hand, order requires the active taming of conflict. However, this is often impossible without an actual or threatened recourse to violence. In game-theoretic language, violence is off the equilibrium path of order. On the other hand, violent conflict entails the successful contestation of existing order, and its collapse.

This chapter analyzes the relation between collaboration and control and argues that military resources generally trump the population's prewar political and social preferences in spawning control. In turn, control has a decisive impact on the population's collaboration with a political actor. However, the amount of military resources required for the imposition of full and permanent control in a country torn by civil war is enormous and, therefore, typically lacking. This places a premium on the effective use of violence as a key instrument for establishing and maintaining control – and thus for generating collaboration and deterring defection; in turn, effective violence requires discrimination.

THE ALLOCATION OF COLLABORATION

A robust empirical observation is that the allocation of collaboration among belligerents is closely related to the distribution of control, that is, the extent to which actors are able to establish exclusive rule on a territory.

This chapter develops a theory of selective violence as a joint process. Political actors operating in a regime of fragmented sovereignty must rely on selective violence to deter defection (i.e., active collaboration with the rival actor), despite lacking the resources for monitoring the population. Selective violence entails the personalization of violence and requires information that is asymmetrically distributed between political actors and individual civilians. Within the institutional context defined by irregular war, violence results from the convergence of two distinct but related processes: the political actors' attempts to deter individual defection, and individuals' decision to provide information to political actors. I supply a political economy of the joint production of violence, formulate a model that captures the key aspects of the theory, and specify a set of empirical predictions.

The argument is as follows. Selective violence presupposes the ability to collect fine-grained information. The most effective way to collect it is to solicit it from individuals, which explains the ubiquity of the practice of denunciation in civil war. Denunciation is central to all civil wars, with the probable exception of a subset of civil wars where no actor attempts to obtain the collaboration of members of groups that allegedly support its rival and where all relevant information is in the public domain, conveyed by visible individual identities.

After he had confronted his old friend and neighbor Sir Ralph Hopton, Sir William Waller called the English Civil War a “warr without an Enemie” (quoted in McGrath 1997:91). For him, the real enemy could only be foreign and unfamiliar.

Civil war fails to supply such enemies, for it is mostly an intimate war taking place “on home ground against the home-grown” (Donagan 1994:1137). Even when civil war supplies foreign enemies, as is the case with occupation and foreign intervention, the foreigners acquire local allies who tend to focalize the antagonism of their local rivals.

Intimacy is essential rather than incidental to civil war: it defines “civil war in its most basic sense” (Ash 1995:125); it is a “fratricidal” war “against our selves, our brothers,” as the English Civil War was described by contemporary participants (Donagan 1994:1166); it divides families, pitting brothers and sisters, parents and children, against each other (e.g., S. Dillon 1991:xiii; West 1985:132).