Nations Torn Asunder: The Challenge of Civil Wars

摘要

Bill Kissane is an Associate Professor of Politics at the London School of Economics. He is the author of a well-received monograph on the Irish civil war (Kissane 2007) and the editor of a noteworthy collection on postconflict issues in European civil wars (Kissane 2014). In Nations Tom Asunder, Kissane sets his sights on the global phenomena of civil war. He does this through a remarkable interdisciplinary analysis. On the one hand, Nations Torn Asunder synthesises a wide array of findings in the social science literature on civil wars, a literature that has been dominated by analyses in economics and political science of post-Second World War (WWII) cases. On the other hand, Kissane supplements these findings by providing a richer historical background and insights drawn from various other sources, from ancient philosophy to romantic art. Kissane's motivation for this grand synthesis is not just to develop a more holistic understanding of the species of human conflict called civil war. His hope is that such an understanding will be of significant use to those actors in the international community who work to prevent, interrupt, and end civil wars.