Introduction

Civil wars–and the violence, death, destruction and dislocation they cause–have become a central concern in the post-Cold War and post-9/11 worlds, even as we witness a more general decline in armed conflicts and related fatalities (Human Security Report Project 2006). Indeed, a new generation of scholarship has placed the study of such wars squarely in the academic mainstream, generating an array of findings on all phases of civil conflict (Tarrow 2007)