Civil Wars and Social Movements

Abstract

While social movements and civil wars have empirical overlaps, the respective fields of study rarely consider each other, as civil war studies focused mainly on macro root‐causes rather than on the meso dynamics of collective action. As Elisabeth Wood noted, “scholars who work primarily on social movements and on civil wars largely work in isolation from one another, with too few analyzing the relationship between the two forms of political opposition as instances of the broader field of contentious politics … Yet scholars of social movements and civil wars share an emphasis on the dynamics of escalation of violence and social mobilization.” Only more recently has research looked at civil wars as often involving social movement dynamics, both at their onset and in their dynamics, singling out some main mechanisms in the shift from social movements to civil wars. Considering trajectories of escalation as moments of time intensification, della Porta et al. pointed at the need to analyze these as contingent and open‐ended processes. Conditions such as the double weakness of civil society and the state, the presence of entrepreneurs of violence, as well as normative and material resources for violence, ethnic and tribal divisions, and domestic and international military interventions must therefore be considered as factors that influence the chains of actors' choices, rather than as structural determinants.