Bill Kissane. Nations Torn Asunder: The Challenge of Civil War.

Abstract

Nations Torn Asunder: The Challenge of Civil War replicates its author’s identification as both a political scientist and a historian. Bill Kissane’s aim is to summarize recent social science literature about civil wars and bring historical analysis of past internal wars into current debates about the nature of and possible remedies for the many internecine conflicts raging around the globe today. Such a synthesis is necessary, Kissane argues, because there is no standard work on civil war, as there is for revolution, in either political science or history, despite the fact that civil wars are general and particular, and past and present, phenomena (3). Nations Torn Asunder is a big step toward a standard treatment, but historians will probably leave the book wishing that there had been more space given to the role of time and memory. Kissane thinks that civil war is still a useful if overly and sometimes clumsily used descriptor. He makes his case for the analytical utility of the term by tackling three problems: how we are to define civil war; the place of the state for understanding violent internal conflicts; and the issue of human divisiveness. These problems are woven into and directly confronted at the conclusion to each of the book’s substantive chapters, which treat, in turn, historiography, global history since 1945, civil wars’ causes, their consequences, and post-conflict peacebuilding (“recovery”). Historians will find much in these chapters that is familiar, but will also benefit from Kissane’s careful and clear recapitulation of key social science findings on, for example, the general factors or objective social conditions that lie below the outbreaks of many civil wars. Kissane’s key conclusions are directed at social scientists: there is no general history of intrastate conflict since 1945 (104); “the state is the one structure that still matters” for explaining how and why civil wars break out; and political scientists have been too quick to label violent conflicts between regimes and internal opposition groups, such as the one that occurred in Egypt between 2013 and 2014, as civil wars (137). For Kissane, a civil war is an organized violent conflict with implications for the continuity of a state’s social order. Civil wars erase social boundaries; “the fear of fragmentation during civil war transcends any era and any specific form of polity” (63). A real civil war not only makes normal politics impossible but also undermines fundamental social relations.