Civil War

"""Postcolonialism is now an extensive body of theoretical and empirical knowledge that draws on Edward Said's critique of Orientalism, the Subaltern Studies collective, and other critical anti-colonial scholarship. While postcolonial scholars have significantly shaped humanistic disciplines such as history, comparative literature, and anthropology, their impact on political science has been rather limited. The resistance to postcolonialism is strongly associated with the perpetuation of Eurocentric perspectives on ex-colonial territories. Contemporary understandings of the state and democracy remain trapped in outdated Eurocentric theory that sheds scarcely any light on postcolonial realities. Mass democracy in India remains a puzzle for political scientists today much as it did for their predecessors n the '50s and '60s Likewise, recent scholarship on civil wars and ethnic conflict has renewed older colonial stereotypes of opportunistic native rebels and primordial divisions in non-Western societies. From the top-down perspective of mainstream US political science, just as for former colonial rulers, rebels and ethnic divides are merely impediments to state-building and economic growth.

The case for a postcolonial approach to the study of politics is thus stronger than ever before. A postcolonial approach can take many forms: critiques of existing Eurocentric theories of comparative politics; bottom-up ethnographic and historical understandings of politics in particular contexts; re-evaluations of commonplace political concepts such as the state, democracy, nationalism, and war in the light of different non-Western experiences. Such an approach calls for a sustained engagement with specific non-Western contexts as well as an openness to anthropological, historical, and area studies knowledge about them. In the same vein, it calls for "provincializing Europe," as Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued recently, in order to avoid treating European experiences as universals. These tasks are simultaneously theoretical and empirical as well as intellectual and practical. As such, they supplement ongoing efforts within the United States and Europe to produce critical scholarship on racial, gender, and sexual minorities, inequalities of class and status, and the interpenetration of power and knowledge in mainstream political science. A postcolonial approach is thus a radical endeavor that seeks to challenge mainstream knowledge on non-Western societies via sustained engagements with them. """

"This edited volume explores and evaluates the different roles played by corruption in post-conflict peacebuilding.

The problem of corruption has become increasingly important in war to peace transitions, eroding confidence in new democratic institutions, undermining economic development, diverting scarce public resources, and reducing the delivery of vital social services. Conflict-affected countries offer an ideal environment for pervasive corruption. Their weak administrative institutions and fragile legal and judicial systems mean that they lack the capacity to effectively investigate and punish corrupt behaviour. In addition, the sudden inflow of donor aid into post-conflict countries and the desire of peacebuilding actors (including the UN, the international financial institutions, aid agencies, and non-governmental organisations) to disburse these funds quickly, create incentives and opportunities for corruption.

While corruption imposes costs and compromises on peacebuilding efforts, opportunities for exploiting public office can also be used to entice armed groups into signing peace agreements, thus stabilising post-war environments. This book explores the different functions of corruption both conceptually and through the lens of a wide range of case studies. It also examines the impact of key anti-corruption policies on peacebuilding environments. The dynamics that shape the relationship between corruption and the political and economic developments in post-conflict countries are complex. This analysis highlights that fighting corruption is only one of several important peacebuilding objectives, and that due consideration must be given to the specific social and political context in considering how a sustainable peace can be achieved.

This book will be of great interest to students of peacekeeping and peacebuilding, criminology, political economy, war and conflict studies, international security and IR.

Reviews

'In this book Cheng, Zaum, and colleagues show how corruption control must be integrated within broader peacebuilding goals, and how we must adapt our choices to both history and rapidly-changing circumstances. The result is an essential guide to the challenges confronting citizens, and those who would aid them, in some of the world’s most troubled areas.'
- Michael Johnston, Colgate University

'It is well known that conflict-affected states are prone to corruption, which in turn undermines faith in public institutions. What is less well known is how corruption can shape the possibilities and character of a transition to peace. By approaching it as a political rather than technical problem, this important book takes a clear-eyed look at the ways in which corruption can threaten — but also, on occasion, facilitate — post-conflict peacebuilding.'
- Simon Chesterman, National University of Singapore, Faculty of Law
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The article deals with the fate and the political attitude of Publius Licinius Crassus, the consul of 97 B.C. and the father of triumvir Marcus Crassus. He was neither a staunch optimate, nor a renegade Marian. He was neutral and his participation in the internal political struggle was minimal. He had no long-term connections with the Sullan or Metellan factions, and his support of the government of Octavius and Merula was determined by the political and military circumstances of the moment. When he and his elder son were murdered by Marians, his younger son Marcus was compelled to join Sulla, but from the beginning he was an outsider in the Sullan circle and this union turned out to be short-term.

""The recent advances in the study of the causes of civil wars, especially under the research umbrella of political science, do not seem to have influenced the Greek research community. The latter ignores both the findings and the weaknesses of the relevant literature. At the same time, the research practices followed by the leading scholars in the field have not been integrated in the work produced by Greek scholars. Many studies on the Greek civil war would benefit from such an exposure to other cases of civil wars and novel methodological approaches. In this article, I discuss the conceptual problems involved in our effort to define the dependent variable, namely civil war, the formulation of a new operational definition, and the new fields of investigation that emerge from it. Going beyond the pointless divide between political science and the classic historiographical method, I emphasize the contributions of the comparative method in our efforts to empirically test falsifiable hypotheses. Finally, I present the main findings in the literature on civil wars from both macro- and micro-level studies and I bridge the disjunction between the two by demonstrating their complementarity.
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