“In the 2020s, civil wars and counterinsurgencies have caused death and displacement on a scale not seen since the Cold War.”
“Yet the academic field dedicated to studying such wars has never been less relevant to their resolution. Conflict studies is the child of a bygone era: a world in which Western scholars studied wars in faraway places, and Western states intervened in those same wars.”
“Just how closely the study of violent conflict was linked to the unique international moment that gave rise to it has only become clear since that moment passed.”
“who needs to understand how civil wars end or how armed groups behave? An entire industry specializing in mediation, peacekeeping, disarmament, or transitional justice has become largely obsolete.”
“For three decades, its proponents generally assumed that Western governments were actors with the power to effect change for the better—at times misguided, but fundamentally well-intentioned.”
“Then came Gaza: an unprecedented shock to scholars’ widespread belief that policymakers shared their values. Worse, instead of speaking out as other disciplines did, the field morally collapsed from within, by remaining overwhelmingly silent in the face of Western-backed mass killing in Gaza.”
“What, then, was conflict studies for?”
“Conflict studies in its current form—a field exploring the drivers and the outcomes of civil wars and political violence by drawing, often comparatively, on country-level analysis—was born in the 1990s.”
“During the Cold War, insurgencies had been studied by sociologists of revolutions and by theorists of social movements and anticolonial struggles. But mainstream political science and security studies were preoccupied with competition between superpowers and the threat of nuclear war.”
“With the end of the Cold War, studies of civil wars suddenly proliferated, receiving growing attention from Western publics.”
“During this period, the UN and the Western states—what was then called the “international community”—mediated peace agreements that ended decade-long wars in Cambodia, El Salvador, and elsewhere.”
“UN peacekeeping missions more than doubled between 1988 and 1994, and their head count increased sevenfold.”
“The gravitational pull of humanitarian interventions and state-building operations was essential to the growth of conflict studies.”
“Questions of whether and how to intervene prompted fervent debates, whose protagonists became public figures. Participants and close observers of these interventions subsequently produced textbooks and articles. A body of work emerged that examined the conditions under which multilateral peace operations were likely to succeed or fail.”
“A leading voice was Mary Kaldor, a British political scientist and peace activist”
“Kaldor’s argument was symptomatic of the field’s widespread tendency to adopt a condescending, reprobatory attitude toward the causes non-Western belligerents were fighting for.”
“This view was even more blatant in the hugely influential econometric analyses of Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler. The two scholars portrayed rebels as motivated above all by greed, not politics.”
“The argument was not of mere academic interest: Collier headed the World Bank’s research department at the time, and the policy recommendations he and Hoeffler drew from their analysis reinforced incumbent governments as well as the bank’s own prescriptions for market liberalization.”
“In the academy, Collier and Hoeffler’s papers unleashed a torrent of regression analyses linking the risk of civil war to everything from poverty to the presence of mountains or forests.”
“That body of work took the field’s distance from its object of study to an extreme. Up-and-coming scholars wishing to contribute did not even need to have ever visited a country at war; it was enough to crunch numbers from a U.S. campus.”
“By the late 1990s, justifications for intervention were taking on messianic tones. Proponents of the “Responsibility to Protect” bestowed upon Western governments the duty to save poor countries from barbaric wars.”
“From Bosnia to East Timor, interventions turned to social engineering: transitional justice, security sector reform, constitutional design in divided societies, and nation-building. Every aspect of these operations spawned entire sub-literatures.”
“The onset of the War on Terror further illustrated how closely developments in the field were linked to Western policies. Interventionism received a boost that went far beyond Afghanistan and Iraq.”
“Policymakers scanned what they labeled “weak” or “failed” states from which the next attack might emerge. Faraway conflicts that once might have been seen as mere humanitarian problems became potential national security threats, and development assistance became heavily securitized as a result.”
“As Western states shifted from peacekeeping and humanitarian interventions toward counterinsurgency, the field followed.”
“Scholars began seeking to understand insurgents’ success in winning popular support and the effects of state repression. This scholarship was highly diverse, much of it written from a critical vantage point, often pointing to the counterproductive consequences of Western interventions and questioning their underlying assumptions. Even so, the quest for policy relevance shaped the field as a whole, even on its fringes.”
“Researchers began considering political violence as a phenomenon in itself, rather than merely a higher “temperature of conflict”—a theoretical breakthrough that paved the way for new scholarship.”
“Analytical tools were developed to unpack insurgent behaviors from every possible angle: the nature of their violence, their governance systems, their transnational connections, their ability to remain united or propensity to fragment, their competition with rivals, their transformations over time.”
“We felt like detectives solving topical puzzles: why are insurgents looting here but not there? Why is this group engaging in sexual violence while the other is not? Through granular, context-specific analysis, we could transcend the gross generalizations and probabilistic models of our predecessors and help establish the causes of political violence. And there was money available to pursue our research agendas.”
“Our expert advocacy against one-size-fits-all solutions in countries subjected to Western interventionism could take the form of confrontational critiques without necessarily putting an end to the exchange.”
“We were awkwardly placed between the policy world and the societies we were studying, which were not our own.”
“Even in places where participants shared genuine reciprocal interest, we learned that real foreign policy decisions were made elsewhere, at echelons far above us and the cheerful bureaucrats we talked to, and according to rationales that had little to do with the knowledge exchange we were part of.”
“opportunities for sharing research findings with policymakers abounded. The assumption that such exchanges could eventually trickle up and influence decision-making was central to the development of conflict studies. That assumption unraveled quickly.”
“Just as conflict studies came into full bloom, a widespread disillusionment took hold in the West regarding the lofty ambitions of worldwide interventionism. The failure of externally imposed state-building in Afghanistan and Iraq mired militaries in endless wars, right up to the chaotic withdrawal from Kabul in 2021.”
“Western states were also simply running out of opportunities to get involved in crises in the Global South.”
“Worsening relations with Russia after the start of the war in Ukraine in 2014 paralyzed the UN Security Council, disrupting longstanding patterns of multilateral conflict management.”
“Russia and Middle Eastern powers, rattled by the 2011 uprisings, began intervening in regional conflicts.”
“Western commitment to the so-called rules-based order had always been subject to the caveats of realpolitik, but even the pretense of such an order became increasingly difficult to maintain.”
“The last bastion of Western interventionism was in the Sahel, where France led a quixotic quest to prop up weak governments against mounting jihadist insurgencies through a “holistic” stabilization package and UN and EU peacekeeping missions.”
“From 2020 onward, a series of military coups toppled those governments. In one country after another, the putschists expelled the French as well as the peacekeepers, while turning to Russian military instructors and Turkish weaponry for support.”
“The days of UN-brokered settlements and Western-backed stabilization efforts were gone, while atrocities against civilians were on the rise again.”
“For two decades, a consensus held among both political scientists and military strategists that winning hearts and minds was key to counterinsurgency, and that indiscriminate violence was counterproductive. That consensus broke down, including in conflict studies itself.”
“Looking back at Russia’s war in Chechnya and Western-backed counterinsurgencies in the Cold War, some scholars began arguing that using brute force against civilians could work.”
“A gap had opened between our intellectual community and the institutions that helped establish it.”
“The erosion of the liberal interventionist order also meant researchers had rapidly shrinking access to conflict zones.”
“Our discipline responded by outsourcing data collection in the field to local researchers”
“In a post-Western world, an essentially Western social science discipline was rapidly losing depth”
“conflict studies carried on largely as before, tackling many of the same questions, with little comment on the decay of the international order that had birthed it.”
“the challenge came not from newly interventionist authoritarian powers, but from within the West itself, in the form of Western governments’ support for Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza”
“The call to prevent mass atrocities, which was foundational to the emergence of conflict studies in the 1990s, assumed a clear distribution of roles. The villains were warlords in the former Yugoslavia, African and Middle Eastern dictators, or bearded, fanatical terrorists. Western governments were there to end or prevent the massacres—even if they were often sluggish and needed to be jolted into action. Now, these same governments backed Israel’s war of annihilation while pretending that nothing had changed”
“the deafening silence of our discipline about Gaza”
“the field’s most prominent scholars have remained mute”
“After losing touch with one of their primary institutional audiences, conflict studies scholars are now losing touch with their core professional ethics.”
“Conflict studies, however, has remained conspicuously quiet in contrast with two adjacent disciplines where debates are raging: genocide studies and international law.”
“In genocide studies, a group of scholars have denounced what they see as their colleagues’ silence, declaring their discipline to be futile after failing to see Gaza for what it was.”
“Scholars of international law have recognized Gaza as a fatal blow to their discipline’s raison d’être, while mocking their own tendency to carry on unperturbed (“there is always another conference to attend”).”
“the discipline’s ingrained worldview, in which mass atrocities are committed by bad people in faraway places—not by, and with the full support of, liberal democracies.”
“Was our work just a prop for advancing Western hegemony? Was conflict studies, even if inadvertently, an imperial science?”
“Our space is shrinking. Academic jobs and research funding are vanishing, and so is the demand for fine-grained country-level expertise in policy circles. Many of us will not survive professionally.”
“Ultimately, those still cherishing the study of bumpy social dynamics and the idea that “a theory of war must be sourced from where it is lived and not from worlds far removed from the action,” as the anthropologist Munira Khayyat recently wrote in a remarkable study of southern Lebanon, will have to think hard about how to salvage their relevance.”
“Libya’s Fragmentation: Structure and Process in Violent Conflict.”