Month: December 2023

(Not including family shots I don’t share publicly). Lots of others I really enjoyed can be found on my Flickr and Instagram pages. All of these were shot with either the Canon RF 24-105/4 or the Canon EF 100/2.8 Macro; I clearly like either very large or very small subjects to photograph.

The editors of the Journal of Civil Wars asked me to reflect on the evolution of the field since I entered graduate school, for the 25th Anniversary Special Issue of the journal. I was happy to do so. The full, open access text can be found here.

I made a few arguments:

• We’ve seen three broad “waves” of civil war research that each was characterized by a particular set of areas of focus. I kind of “grew up” in the second wave, while much of my more recent work has been located in the third wave.
• While there are general characteristics of each wave, the field has been enduringly fragmented across geographic, methodological, unit-of-analysis, and social network divides. These is inevitable but has some downsides; as any European reader will see, for instance, mine is admittedly a fairly US-centric view of the field.
• I offer some specific thoughts/advice/self-denunciation on what has been most valuable in terms of process, feedback, and collaboration in making my own research.
• The third, current, wave is moving toward crafting a broader “political violence” field. This is overall a good thing that explores exciting new areas that are related to but move beyond the central questions of the first two waves. It also, however, reflects the challenges of a saturated core of the civil war research area – it’s harder and harder to make major new contributions in areas that were central to the field 20 or even 10 years ago. This creates distinctive challenges for new entrants, and puts on onus on more senior scholars to encourage and reward innovation and new directions by younger researchers.
• The subfield’s evolution shows a blend of intellectual innovation with direct responses to real-world political events, an interaction that extends back to the 1950s (when places like RAND and scholars like the modernization theorists responded to wars in Algeria, Malaya, and French Indochina by investigating sources of rebellion).
• More embarrassingly, re-reading the abstract for the first time in awhile shows how much I apparently love to use some variant of the word “broad”!