Realism and Reconstruction: A Comparative Perspective

Religion, Civilization, and Civil War: 1945 Through the New Millennium. By Jonathan Fox. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004. 312 pp., $75.00 (ISBN: 0-7391-0744-5). The broad question motivating Jonathan Fox's Religion, Civilization, and Civil War: 1945 Through the New Millennium is interesting, both theoretically and empirically: What is the overall influence of religion and civilizational divides on intrastate conflicts? Fox begins by noting that the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, brought renewed attention to the role of religion in conflict and highlighted the inadequacies of our understanding of this relationship. He argues that much of the conflict literature on the causal impact of religion—as well as its kin: civilization—suffers from ad hoc analyses, too little large-N empirical testing, and too little theorizing. Thus, Fox sets out to correct these shortcomings by examining the role of religion and civilizational divides in intrastate conflicts between 1945 and 2001, utilizing both the Minorities at Risk data on ethnic conflicts and the State Failure data on civil wars, mass killings, and revolutions. The primary achievement of Religion, Civilization, and Civil War is to establish correlations between a number of religious variables and types of intrastate conflict. Indeed, to this end the book contains 188 tables and figures as well as a detailed data appendix. Fox expands the Minorities at Risk and State Failure datasets, both of which are frequently used in conflict studies, by collecting information on several religious indicators that are hypothesized to cause conflict: religious identity, religious grievances, demands for religious rights, official religion, and religious institutions. The book falls short of providing convincing causal accounts of how these religious variables affect intrastate conflicts as well as why this relationship has, as the data indicates, changed over time, but the hypotheses and findings are a fruitful point of …

Introduction

This volume explores the nature of civil war in the modern world and in historical perspective. Civil wars represent the principal form of armed conflict since the end of the Second World War, and certainly in the contemporary era. The nature and impact of civil wars suggests that these conflicts reflect and are also a driving force for major societal change. In this sense, Understanding Civil Wars: Continuity and change in intrastate conflict argues that the nature of civil war is not fundamentally changing in nature. The book includes a thorough consideration of patterns and types of intrastate conflict and debates relating to the causes, impact, and ‘changing nature’ of war. A key focus is on the political and social driving forces of such conflict and its societal meanings, significance and consequences. The author also explores methodological and epistemological challenges related to studying and understanding intrastate war. A range of questions and debates are addressed. What is the current knowledge regarding the causes and nature of armed intrastate conflict? Is it possible to produce general, cross-national theories on civil war which have broad explanatory relevance? Is the concept of ‘civil wars’ empirically meaningful in an era of globalization and transnational war? Has intrastate conflict fundamentally changed in nature? Are there historical patterns in different types of intrastate conflict? What are the most interesting methodological trends and debates in the study of armed intrastate conflict? How are narratives about the causes and nature of civil wars constructed around ideas such as ethnic conflict, separatist conflict and resource conflict? This book will be of much interest to students of civil wars, intrastate conflict, security studies and international relations in general.

Civil wars have occurred often in the post–World War II era. Their frequency of initiation decreased after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, but the persistence of these conflicts meant that there was not a dramatic decline after the end of the Cold War. The causes of civil wars and their consequences for the stability of the international environment have, however, changed dramatically in the last two-and-a-half decades. During the Cold War, most civil wars were proxy battles between the Soviet Union and the United States; both superpowers were interested in maintaining regimes that were sympathetic to their side. The Soviet Union was never interested in the promotion of democratic regimes. The United States professed a commitment to democracy, but when faced with a choice between a Communist or even left-leaning democracy and an autocrat who aligned his state with the West, the United States chose the latter. The strongly positive statistical relationship between per capita income and democracy, which holds for most of the period between 1820 and 2000, disappears during the Cold War, when both superpowers were more interested in external alignment than in democracy.1The impact of civil wars on the stability of the international system has increased during the twenty-first century. September 11, 2001, marks a watershed because, for at least some observers in the advanced industrialized world, the ability of transnational terrorists to destroy two of the tallest buildings and kill thousands of people in the commercial center of the most powerful country in the world, as well as to fly a commercial airliner into the command center of the most powerful military (an event that one of us witnessed first-hand from inside the Pentagon and the other witnessed from the State Department across the Potomac River) represented a sea change in the extent to which developments in poor and remote countries could affect even the strongest and most powerful. September 11 created an urgency that was absent during the 1990s, when major powers believed that they could walk away from war-torn countries such as Somalia with limited consequences for their own polities.Greater urgency however, has not led to agreement, even in the academic world, on two critical issues: First, what are the potential threats to stability that might emanate from civil wars and weak governance in poor and remote areas of the world? Second, what policy instruments, if any, can be deployed to treat civil wars and reduce the downstream effects on other states and global order? There are no consensus answers to any of these fundamental issues.Rather than trying to identify some common ground, which we do not believe exists, we offer our own assessment of the consequences of civil wars, the nature of civil wars, and possible interventions that external actors might most effectively pursue. Our judgments have been informed by the essays in this issue of Dædalus and in the previous issue, but are not dictated by them.Civil wars can impact the wealthiest and most powerful countries in the world. The most consequential potential impacts are transnational terrorism and pandemic diseases, global crises that could be caused by intrastate conflict. Civil wars might also lead to large-scale migration, regional instability, and potential great-power conflict. And high levels of intrastate violence and loss of government control can often give rise to massive criminality, though this is most effectively addressed through domestic law enforcement rather than international initiatives.The nature of civil wars varies. The most important distinction is between civil strife that is caused by the material or political interests of the protagonists and civil strife that is caused by transnational ideological movements. The latter, if successful, might threaten regional stability and even the stability of the contemporary international system that is based on sovereign statehood. Transnational ideological movements, which in the contemporary world are almost all associated with particular versions of Islam, base legitimacy on the divine and reject both existing boundaries and secular authority. While transnational movements claiming divine authority are more threatening to the existing international order, it is very difficult for such movements to secure material resources. Institutions that control these resources, primarily states but also international organizations, NGOs, and multinational corporations, are manifestations of the extant global order. When combatants in civil wars are motivated by material incentives and accept the principles of the existing international order, then the “standard treatment” for addressing civil strife- UN peacekeeping plus some foreign assistance-is the most effective option if combatants believe that they are in a hurting stalemate, and if there is agreement among the major powers. If, however, combatants reject the existing order, then the standard treatment will not work.Finally, based on most, but not all of the essays in these two issues of Dædalus, the opportunities for external interveners are limited. Countries afflicted by civil strife cannot become Denmark or be placed on the road to Denmark; they cannot be transformed into prosperous democratic states. The best that external actors can hope for is adequate governance in which there is security, the provision of some services especially related to health and possibly education, and some limited economic growth. This is true whether the standard treatment is applied or if one side can win decisively. More ambitious projects aimed at consolidated democracy, sustained economic growth, and the elimination of corruption are mostly doomed to fail and can be counterproductive regardless of whether the combatants are interested in seizing control of an existing state or are motivated by some alternative, divine vision of how political life might be ordered. National political elites in countries afflicted with civil strife will be operating in limited-access, rent-seeking political orders in which staying in power is their primary objective. National elites will not accept accountability, legal-rational bureaucracies, or free and fair elections, all of which would threaten their power.The essays in these two issues of Dædalus and the literature more broadly identify six threats from civil strife that might directly impact the wealthy and more powerful polities of the world, or the nature of the postwar liberal international order. The first two-pandemic diseases and transnational terrorism-are potentially the most consequential, although neither poses the kind of existential threat presented by war among nuclear armed states.Pandemic diseases. As the essay by Paul Wise and Michele Barry points out, since 1940, some four hundred new diseases have emerged among human populations.2 Most of these diseases have been zoonoses: disease vectors that have jumped from animal populations, in which they may be benign, to human populations, in which they might cause serious illness. Most of these outbreaks have occurred in a belt near the equator, where human beings intermingle more closely with animals, such as bats and monkeys. The main impact of civil wars is, however, not in increasing the number of new diseases, but rather diminishing the capacities of health monitoring systems that could identify, isolate, and possibly treat new diseases. Effective detection requires constant monitoring, which is extremely difficult in areas that are afflicted by civil war. Epidemics, or at least disease outbreaks, are inevitable given the ways in which human beings impinge more and more on animal habitats, but allowing an epidemic to evolve into a pandemic is optional. If effective detection and monitoring are in place, a disease outbreak will not turn into a pandemic that could kill millions. So far, the world's population has been spared such an outbreak. If, however, a disease can be transmitted through the air, and if civil strife or something else prevents effective monitoring, the likelihood of a pandemic increases.Transnational terrorism. Terrorism, which in recent years has primarily, but not exclusively, been associated with Islamic jihadism, can arise in many different environments. At the time of the September 11 attacks, Al Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden were resident in Afghanistan, a very poor, land-locked country. Before that, Bin Laden had found refuge in Sudan. Most of the participants in the September 11 attack, however, were born in the heart of the Arab world, namely in Saudi Arabia, and had resided for a number of years in Germany. The perpetrators of the July 7 attacks on the mass transit system in London were Muslims of Somali and Eritrean origin, raised and schooled in the United Kingdom. The bomber, whose efforts to bring down an airliner headed for Detroit were frustrated by a courageous and alert passenger, was a Nigerian citizen who had spent time with jihadi ideologues in the Middle East. The attacks in Paris and Nice in 2015–2016 were carried out by individuals born in North Africa, but who had lived for many years in Western Europe. The murders of fourteen people in San Bernardino, California, were perpetrated by a U.S. citizen born in Chicago, whose parents were from Pakistan and who was educated at California State University, San Bernardino, and his wife, who was born in Pakistan but spent many years in Saudi Arabia. The massacre at the Orlando, Florida, night club in 2016 was carried out by the American-born son of a man who had emigrated from Afghanistan and had lived for many years in the United States.While terrorism associated with Islamic jihadism is hardly an exclusive product of safe havens in countries afflicted by civil strife or poor governance, the existence of such safe havens does, as Martha Crenshaw argues, exacerbate the problem.3 Safe havens are environments within which would-be terrorists can train over an extended period of time. A number of terrorists, even those raised in Western, industrialized countries, have taken advantage of such training. Transnational terrorist organizations might or might not secure weapons of mass destruction; they might or might not develop more effective training; their operatives might or might not be discovered by intelligence services in advanced industrialized democracies. Civil war and weak governance, however, increase the likelihood that transnational terrorist groups will find safe havens, and safe havens increase the likelihood of attacks that could kill large numbers of people.Global pandemics and transnational terrorism are the two most serious threats presented by civil wars. The probability that either will significantly undermine the security of materially well-off states is uncertain, but both are distinct sources of danger. Civil wars and weak governance increase the likelihood that large numbers of people could be killed by either threat. Neither is an existential threat, but both could have grave consequences for advanced industrialized democratic states. Hundreds of thousands or millions of people could die from a pandemic outbreak resulting from an easily transmissible disease vector or from a transnational terrorist attack that could involve dirty nuclear weapons, an actual nuclear weapon (still quite hard to obtain), or artificial biologics (increasingly easy to produce).Either a global pandemic or terrorist attack, possibly using weapons of mass destruction, would almost certainly lead to some constraints on the traditional freedoms that have been associated with liberal democratic societies.Migration, regional instability, and great-power conflict. Civil wars are also dangerous because they could lead to greater refugee flows, regional destabilization, and great-power conflict. Not every civil war has the potential for generating these global crises, but if generated, they would be a product not just of civil strife but also of policy choices that were made by advanced industrialized countries. In this regard, they should be contrasted with possible pandemics and transnational terrorism that, arguably, would occur regardless of the policies adopted by wealthy democratic states.As Sarah Lischer's essay shows, the number of migrants–especially people displaced by civil wars–has increased dramatically in recent years.4 Most of these migrants have been generated by three conflicts, those in Afghanistan, Syria, and Somalia. The wave of migrants entering Western Europe has destabilized traditional politics and contributed to the success of Brexit in the UK, the increased share of votes secured by right-wing parties in a number of Western European countries, and the electoral gains of a number of right-wing parties in Eastern Europe. Anxiety about immigration contributed to Donald Trump's victory in the United States. European countries, even those on the left like Sweden, have responded to rising numbers of refugees by tightening the rules for potential migrants. The European Union reached a deal with Turkey in 2016 to provide financial resources in exchange–among other things–for an increase in acceptance of refugees. At the same time, the sheer number of refugees in Jordan and Lebanon can potentially undermine government control in those countries.The impact of civil wars in one country can spread to surrounding areas. ISIL's ambitious campaigns have afflicted Syria and Iraq. Civil strife in Somalia has, as Seyoum Mesfin and Abdeta Beyene write, influenced the policies of Ethiopia.5 The FARC insurgency in Colombia impacted Venezuela and Ecuador. Conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) drew in several neighboring states. Some regional conflicts have resulted in millions of deaths, most notably the war in the DRC, with limited impact on and attention from wealthy industrialized countries. Wars in the Middle East, however, have been more consequential because they have led to the involvement of Russia and the United States, they are closer to Europe and have therefore generated more refugees, and Middle Eastern oil is a global commodity on which much of the world depends. Regional destabilization in the Middle East does matter for the West; regional destabilization in Central Africa may only matter for those who live in the neighborhood.Direct confrontation between major powers has not occurred since the end of World War II. In well-governed areas, where civil wars are absent, the likelihood of great-power conflict is small. Territorial conquest has been delegitimized (though Russia's annexation of Crimea stands as a recent exception to this norm). The existence of nuclear weapons has removed uncertainty about the costs of a confrontation between nuclear-armed states with assured second-strike capability. Great-power confrontations are, however, more likely in areas that are afflicted by civil strife, because instability and appeals from local actors could draw in major state actors with vested interests. This is especially true for the Middle East. Moreover, in countries on the periphery of Russia that were formerly part of the Soviet Union, especially those with sizeable Russian ethnic populations, the government in Moscow has demonstrated that it can increase the level of internal unrest. There is no guarantee of stability, even in countries that might have been stable absent external support for dissident groups that would otherwise have remained quiescent.As Barry Posen suggests in his essay, multipolarity makes all aspects of external involvement in civil wars more fraught, including the possibility of a conflict among the major powers.6 In a multipolar world, no single pole is likely to be able to dictate outcomes to potential combatants. The possibility of a hurting stalemate declines because all sides hope that their fortunes could be resurrected by some outside power. Absent a hurting stalemate, which makes the standard treatment including UN Peacekeeping Operations (UN PKOs) and other forms of assistance attractive to major combatants, civil wars are more likely to continue. The contemporary international environment is more multipolar than was the case during the bipolarity of the Cold War or the unipolarity of the United States that lasted for a little over a decade after the Soviet Union collapsed. Managing civil wars will now be more difficult. The possibility of great-power conflict has increased. And because wars will prove harder to end, refugee flows will persist.Criminality. Criminality is a final area in which there may be some association between civil wars and weak governance, and the well-being of individuals in advanced industrialized countries. Because of the ease of transportation and communication, criminality is not limited to specific countries. Internet theft can originate from and impact many different countries. The loss of billions of dollars a year, drug smuggling, and human trafficking are familiar manifestations of transnational criminality. As Vanda Felbab-Brown writes, large-scale criminality can greatly exacerbate the challenges states face in defeating insurgencies and ending civil wars.7Addressing criminality associated with civil wars is fraught with difficulty. The association between criminal gangs and the state may be uncertain. National elites may protect criminal organizations. Some criminal organizations may generate revenues that help national elites stay in power. Yet while transnational criminality does affect individuals and institutions in the wealthier democracies, it is not a threat to their domestic political orders. The problem is best dealt with through national and international law enforcement.The most important conclusion that emerges from the discussions at the core of our project is that the policy options for addressing civil wars are limited. The essays in these two issues suggest that there are four factors that external actors must take into account when considering responses to intrastate warfare in weakly governed polities: the extent to which the interests of external and national political elites are complementary; the presence of irreconcilable groups in a civil conflict; the threat of great-power conflict; and the costs of intervention.Alignment of interests. Of these four factors, the greatest impediment to successful interventions is the misalignment of domestic and external elites' interests. Domestic elites governing an area afflicted by civil strife will be primarily interested in keeping themselves in power. The path to Denmark is paved with free and fair elections, rational-legal bureaucracies, and the rule of law, all of which are antithetical to the interests of those who hold power in closed-access or exclusive polities.The best that external actors can hope for is to bring some degree of security to areas that are afflicted with civil strife, which is easier to accomplish if none of the combatants are motivated by ideologies that cannot be reconciled, and if competing major or regional powers are not in proxy wars. even if irreconcilable and states are not part of a civil ambitious for and will fail because domestic elites are primarily interested in staying in not in and security assistance has been effective in a limited number of state institutions and the of civil but then only and only to some assistance might of but these are likely to or away when foreign assistance is the support of domestic external actors will fail to civil wars or effectively deal with from such of the world's especially polities by intrastate are rent-seeking states in which the political in power through foreign assistance and will not lead to into the night the number of votes the number of that political to stay in power. The in which the government is to but to within a is not the of almost all of human in almost all in the world, were and If individuals could the of the state they some external actors might be able to the incentives of national elites in the which this might are elites in countries by civil war are almost in what and political have an exclusive Their primary is to stay in power. This requires the and of of their support Most they must have command over of those who control the of violence that they cannot be in exclusive or rent-seeking orders are on the loss of and even life that would from a loss of will efforts for hold free and fair or to corruption as existential more like which are often sources for elites in exclusive might be as actors are only likely to have if domestic elites are on foreign as essay is often the and if external actors can threaten to which is often not the If domestic have sources of such as from or if the state is will not be able to threaten to assistance as government and have constraints were in Afghanistan, where the United States, billions of dollars in elections, and was to the of the rather than efforts to the fundamental of because such his The were because could not (though corruption on all to the of some from the of were by because the his and his in his essay, a for the that occur when the interests of external and internal actors are which will be the case when external actors to in rent-seeking on security that an effective national security at least effective in the of external is much harder than has been or As interests of domestic elites are often different from the interests of external The on power and domestic threats to their while the more on international or transnational threats that could their is, as a problem that cannot be the United States is most likely to provide security assistance to states that are governed if these polities were they would not external security In rent-seeking political will not the military as an the armed will be as as a potential that must be through some of and military in that to the of the A military of effectively in the is what in rent-seeking states do not As it would be almost for an external to such as with military or or which would be in the interests of national but not in the interests of external actors to an effective national military this the collapse of the in in one decade of U.S. military and billions of dollars of was hardly The United States that to effectively its ideological an that would not threaten and their on wars do not the that countries to stable polities and significantly the economic of large of the As with to the Middle East, the rent-seeking that were the conflict are likely to be during of civil is a that elites to those with they to stay in the of the external powers is the problem of to when the challenges of monitoring the of security assistance actors are not likely to be able to or even the interests and of actors in countries by civil may be may be power and their live in and for a while foreign and often for one at if the of the United States or other external is to help countries that have been afflicted with civil war consolidated democracy and there will be between the of domestic and foreign presence of and powers. If one or more of the major are or if two or more major powers have and interests conflict policy options to treat civil wars will be terrorism has been motivated primarily by ideological movements that reject the extant rules and of the global order. As the essays by and motivated have a that is antithetical to the almost of in the contemporary international the sovereign state The principles and associated with and international are to those that have been and by Islamic jihadi Islamic as points out, other authority is from not from some Islamic there is a fundamental distinction between the world of by Muslims and by Islamic law, and the of or where Islamic law is not to some of Islamic law, Islamic states can only with other Islamic with the world, are limited to the most contemporary of Islamic jihadi has that its is to a in the Middle East. a would state and the and rules of an secular who to a sovereign state the same to external powers that a on the of the contemporary international system and the of existing state cannot be with foreign assistance and they will not accept such the most policy option for those to the of the might be to war a As the armed were able to the while to the international order, from the of the may however, be to may have to be as the of Afghanistan and when with a a or parties are a more attractive as the misalignment of domestic and external interests has policy do the misalignment of major interests. The presence of major powers in a civil as can potentially threaten the security of as well as the international the

Book Summary: This comprehensive new Handbook explores the significance and nature of armed intrastate conflict and civil war in the modern world. Civil wars and intrastate conflict represent the principal form of organised violence since the end of World War II, and certainly in the contemporary era. These conflicts have a huge impact and drive major political change within the societies in which they occur, as well as on an international scale. The global importance of recent intrastate and regional conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, Nepal, Cote d'Ivoire, Syria and Libya – amongst others – has served to refocus academic and policy interest upon civil war. Chapter Summary: This chapter provides an assessment of current theories regarding peacebuilding efforts following civil war, evaluates UN peacebuilding efforts over the past 20 years, and offers suggestions regarding future research on the topic.

Forum on Eric Foner’s “The Causes of the American Civil War: Recent Interpretations and New Directions” Aaron Astor (bio), Judith Giesberg (bio), Kellie Carter Jackson (bio), Martha S. Jones (bio), Brian Matthew Jordan (bio), James Oakes (bio), Jason Phillips (bio), Angela M. Riotto (bio), Anne Sarah Rubin (bio), and Manisha Sinha (bio) There is something remarkably fresh about Eric Foner’s 1974 essay, “The Causes of the American Civil War: Recent Interpretations and New Directions.” At the crossroads of the new political history, social and labor history, modernization theory, and recent studies (including his own) of the ideologies of proslavery and antislavery thought, Foner synthesized disparate threads of 1970s scholarship into a coherent set of questions that remain relevant today. Foner was particularly interested in competing visions of modernization, as an ideological project as much as an economic one. After several years of productive scholarship over the Civil War’s causes, the debate has unfortunately re-ossified into the old set of distinctions between the “fundamentalists” and “revisionists,” with the former emphasizing deep structural differences between antebellum Northern and Southern society that led “inevitably” toward secession and civil war and the latter highlighting the contingencies of post–second party system 1850s politics. Moreover, as Frank Towers observed in 2011, the “collapse” of the modernization theory of the Civil War’s causes has led to several new directions that have yet to cohere into a new interpretive framework.1 Historians of nineteenth-century politics have posed a variety of ways through the morass. Perhaps most productive are those that have expanded notions of the “political” to incorporate the actions of those denied access to [End Page 60] the ballot in 1860, including women, African Americans (free and enslaved), recent immigrants, Indigenous peoples and those otherwise excluded from the voting process (such as young people). What emerges from these newer studies of late antebellum politics is a more robust understanding of social tensions preceding the Civil War and, more importantly, the manifestation of them as struggles over power. But there remains a question that has long animated more traditional political historians and that still requires attention by historians of the Civil War’s causes: how did ordinary Americans define the limits of legitimate political action? After all, the Civil War most immediately followed the refusal of several states to accept the legitimacy of a national presidential election. In a post-2020 election age where election denial has emerged as a recurring crisis, historians need to explore the question of legitimacy at the point where American mass democracy produced a civil war. Indeed, just as with contemporary attempts to delegitimize the votes of more marginalized elements of twenty-first-century America, the prospect of previously excluded people influencing the political course of the Union in the 1850s fueled a great deal of cultural panic, especially but not exclusively in the South. It mattered then (and now) who participated in politics and, just as importantly, how such political action altered Americans’ understanding of the Union. I would propose a different framework to assess late antebellum political tensions and the coming of the Civil War through the lens of constitutional democracy and its inherent contradictions. By constitutional, I mean more than the 1787 Federal Constitution or even the various state constitutions. I mean the broader set of structures, habits, laws, and procedures that constitute the basic workings of American democratic politics. In other words, how did Americans constitute a democratic polity—not only who was “allowed” to participate in democratic political action, but how were those boundaries shaped, enforced, and, at key moments, rejected? Consider, for example, the ethno-racial identities of, say, Cincinnati’s recently arriving German immigrant artisans who shifted partisan allegiances in a world where debates over slavery in the West superseded earlier questions of immigration, temperance, labor or railroad development. Or think of enslaved women in Tennessee who circulated news and rumors in the wake of the Harpers Ferry raid and fueled wider fears of insurrectionary networks stretching from the Upper to Lower South. Both groups operated on or outside the limits of the legitimate formal democratic polity. They, like so many others, understood the political meaning of their actions...

This examination of the interaction between fictional representations of the Civil War and the memoirs and autobiographies of Civil War soldiers argues that veterans' accounts taught later generations to represent the conflict in terms of individual experiences, revealing how national identity developed according to written records of the past. Author Craig A. Warren explores seven popular novels about the Civil War - The Red Badge of Courage, Gone with the Wind, None Shall Look Back, The Judas Field, The Unvanquished, The Killer Angels, and Absalom, Absalom! His study reveals that the war owes much of its cultural power to a large but overlooked genre of writing: postwar memoirs, regimental histories, and other narratives authored by Union and Confederate veterans. Warren contends that literary scholars and historians took seriously the influence that veterans' narratives had on the shape and character of Civil War fiction. Scars to Prove It fills a gap in the study of Civil War literature and will appeal to those interested in the literature, military writing, and literary studies related to the Civil War.

Reviewed by: Upon Provincialism: Southern Literature and National Periodical Culture, 1870–1900 by Bill Hardwig Philip Joseph (bio) Upon Provincialism: Southern Literature and National Periodical Culture, 1870–1900. By Bill Hardwig. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013. Pp. 192. $49.50 cloth; $24.50 paper) As its subtitle suggests, Upon Provincialism provides an account of southern literature during the late nineteenth century, a period when local-color literature came into its own as a form that could be applied to any number of places at the margins of national life. Hardwig argues that in order to understand the early literature of the South, we need to understand, first and foremost, the magazines in which local color appeared, for the writing under consideration “reveals as much about national readers and editors as it does about the region itself” (p. 1). By locating the origins of southern regionalism in the major northeastern monthlies (Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine, The Century), Hardwig locates his own scholarship alongside work [End Page 692] from the past twenty years by critics such as Richard Brodhead, Amy Kaplan, Nancy Glazener, and Stephanie Foote, all of whom privilege the urban reading communities of regionalism as determinants of the literature. The members of these communities sought to define their class status, their relationship to non-white races, and the nature of postbellum American nationality. The scholars agree, more or less, that giving primary place to such concerns of the reading class helps to explain the most salient attributes of literature. Although the larger frame of the argument will seem familiar to scholars who have followed the recent fate of local color/regionalism within criticism, the interest of Upon Provincialism lies partly in the readings of lesser-known stories by writers such as Mary Murfree, George Washington Cable, Charles Chesnutt, Thomas Page, and Lafcadio Hearn. Hardwig finds stories by these writers that have never been examined with any care or reflection, and his readings tend to bring out qualities that complicate our understanding of southern literature, resisting the easy and expected explanation. Thus, Murfree’s “The Romance of Sunrise” undermined the narrow racialist thinking of the physician outsider character, John Cleaver, while recommending the romantic alliance formed between Appalachian insider Selena and the “urban lawyer turned mountain farmer” Jack Trelawney. Just as such readings trouble the view of Murfree as the party most responsible for associating Appalachia with racial deviance, so too Hardwig’s reading of Page’s “No Haid Pawn” demonstrates that plantation fiction may not cohere so neatly as one thought around nostalgia for the happy days of slavery. In “No Haid Pawn,” the ghosts from slave legends enter into the story, serving as a haunting reminder to the narrator of the system’s violence and the suffering of slaves. The readings of such surprising stories hint at a number of points that Hardwig makes here. First of all, although readers of the monthly magazines were hungry to experience the region as if they were tourists, that fact in itself may not lead us to any unified idea of the region. From Hardwig’s perspective, local-color fiction forces us to reckon with the decentering of the South in the national consciousness. To [End Page 693] assume that the region is defined by the Lost Cause—a preoccupation with all that was lost during the Civil War—is to privilege the planter class at the expense of marginal populations, which often appear in works of local color unfazed by the Civil War, actors within alternative historical narratives. Equally important, southern literature appears at times in this study as an exceptional form of local color—exceptional because it opens up the possibility of a touristic experience defined not by easily apprehensible difference, but rather by haunting strangeness and resistance. Those elite urban readers might not be the altogether safe and reactionary lot that we had previously believed them to be. Perhaps they did actually have an appetite for conflict, creolization (a term that gains in import in chapter four), and other unsettling encounters with the foreign. That line of argument gets more and more play as Hardwig’s study moves along toward its conclusion, providing perhaps the best justification...

Language is a means of communication in Literature. People can understand and analyze any story by using language. They can also find out the content of story from different country. Readers can also compare story from one country to another country. They can also translate story from different country with their own mother tongue. One example is The Red Badge of Courage. We can get many lessons and ideas from this American novel. It is a war novel, which focus on American Civil War. Henry Fleming is one of main characters in the novel. Regarding to the history of Civil War, we still have many questions from the content of it. How about the main character‘s dreaming in civil war? Can his bravery influence to his friends? What is the moral value from this war novel? People can get many imaginations and lessons from the main character, Henry Fleming. Descriptive qualitative is a method in discussing this novel. Reading, understanding, and analyzing are the necessity things to do. The idea and opinions from novel and reference books are sources in getting idea. We can take this novel is as a zero to hero novel regarding to the main character‘s activities. All soldiers in his troop surprise when they see a brave-heart person, Henry Flaming. Furthermore, Henry shows that he can beat his cowardice to be a brave man. His wound is a proof of being a hero in his troop. His questions of being a brave soldier show up after he beats all trials in civil war. Self-confidence in Henry Flaming is a way to show that a soldier must have bravery in leading a troop.

Reviewed by: Veteran Americans: Literature and Citizenship from Revolution to Reconstruction by Benjamin Cooper Edward Tang (bio) Veteran Americans: Literature and Citizenship from Revolution to Reconstruction benjamin cooper Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018 240 pp. Benjamin Cooper's Veteran Americans: Literature and Citizenship from Revolution to Reconstruction offers a fascinating and wide-ranging look at writings by and about veterans published during or after three formative conflicts: the American Revolution, the Mexican War, and the Civil War. Linking works from the 1770s to the 1880s, the author asserts that ordinary veterans participated in the literary marketplace to remind the public of their service and sacrifices. These actions, Cooper emphasizes, were not so much calls for sympathy as they were demands for respect from a nation that they helped to establish and then reshape through their martial endeavors. Civilian readers throughout the long nineteenth century, however, mostly ignored veterans and their concerns, even as the nation commemorated its democratic values and opportunities. These selective memories came about, in part, because audiences associated former soldiers and sailors with having the corrupt intentions of beggars, thieves, and confidence men who sought to take advantage of the public's goodwill when requesting pensions or other types of aid. A developing democratic society in the United States also saw itself engaged in "people's wars," in [End Page 595] which citizens of all stripes, and not just combat veterans, contributed to the nation's past triumphs. Cooper usefully builds on prior scholarship such as Dana D. Nelson's Commons Democracy: Reading the Politics of Participation in the Early United States (2015). Like Nelson, Cooper explores the efforts of ordinary people who asserted their public presence through print, or had their stories recovered in more established authors' works, even if these latter writings were unsympathetic to commoners' interests and grievances. In this manner, Veteran Americans evaluates "how literature helps manufacture American citizenship" by promoting a sense of cultural and national belonging for those on the margins of society (10). Cooper focuses on veterans as a distinct group with their own genre, as framed through memoirs, pension and prisoner-of-war narratives, newspaper submissions, pamphlets, and other material. Thus one value of Veteran Americans lies in its inclusion of texts not often examined by, or familiar to, scholars of early American culture. This archive reveals disenfranchised individuals who felt removed from how the larger populace of noncombatants celebrated their nation as a participatory democracy. Part of the problem the veterans' narratives encountered, Cooper continues, was that they competed against more popular and critically accepted genres, from historical romances in the early nineteenth century to works of realism in the latter part of the period, that adopted former servicemen's words, memories, and experiences. Stephan Crane's Red Badge of Courage (1895) presents one example, wherein the novelist never faced combat and was not born until after the Civil War. Despite veterans' facing such problems, Cooper is convincing in his argument that figures such as Joseph Plumb Martin, who fought in the Revolutionary War, "were not simply silenced victims whose injustices were interchangeable but rather wry and inventive literary practitioners" (79). An additional contribution of Veteran Americans is its chronological reach across the long nineteenth century, from which the author evaluates the broad historical overlaps with, and divergences from, each generation's war and the narratives spun from them. This approach makes Cooper's work distinctive since a large body of scholarship has assessed memories of war, public rituals, democratic ideals, and the writings about these categories within specific postwar periods. Alfred F. Young's The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (2000), Sarah J. [End Page 596] Purcell's Sealed with Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America (2010), and John Mac Kilgore's Mania for Freedom: American Literatures of Enthusiasm from the Revolution to the Civil War (2016) are examples that consider the cultural currents within the post-Revolutionary era. For the years after the Civil War, we have Elizabeth Young's Disarming the Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War (1999), David W. Blight's Race and Reunion: The Civil War and American Memory (2001), and Brook...

book reviews269 from First Bull Run to Appomattox, with considerable emphasis on Gettysburg, the subject of sixteen pictures, alternate with meticulous studies of single figures dressed in the precisely rendered uniforms of their units. Every picture exhibits Troiani's painstakingly archaeological approach to his craft. Determined to "Paint it how it was," Troiani carefully studies the uniforms, weapons, and paraphernalia in his own extensive collection and visits historical museums to examine battle flags and the remains of uniforms before beginning a composition . Not surprisingly, an artist ofsuch conscientiousness has little patience with the work of earlier artists in the field such as Gilbert Gaul and William T. Trego, who frequently painted arms and equipment in a historically inaccurate manner. Born in New York City in 1 949, Troiani began to collect military equipment at age eleven, and his fondness for old uniforms became a passion when a year later, while on a family vacation in Paris, he spent an entire day by himself at the Musée de l'Armée. He received his first formal art training at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and then during subsequent summers at New York's Art Students League, but prejudices against realist art he encountered at those schools made it necessary for him to teach himself through an intense personal study of nineteenth-century art. Like Frederic Remington, another American illustrator with a commitment to historical accuracy, Troiani gained much from studying the work and working methods of the French military painter Jean-Bapriste Détaille (1848-1912). And like Détaille (and Remington, for that matter) Troiani often dresses and outfits his models from his own collection, sets their pose and photographs them, and uses the photographs as the basis for his compositions. This exacting scholarly approach, in which details are built up incrementally with a consistently sharp focus, often results in dry and static compositions that stand in sharp contrast to such stirring pictures as Winslow Homer's Inviting a Shot before Petersburg, in which details are subordinated to the total dramatic impact. But Civil War enthusiasts who have been reluctant thus far to invest in one or more of Troiani's limited edition prints will be pleased that a collection of dozens of his best pictures has been brought together in this handsome and affordable book. Ben Bassham Kent State University "Lest We Forget": A Guide to Civil War Monuments in Maryland. By Susan Cooke Soderberg. (Shippensburg, Pa.: White Mane Publishing Company, 1 995. Pp. xxx, 195. $29.95.) Lee's surrender to Grant at Appomattox may have ended the Civil War, but memories of the battles and the men who fought in them continue to persist. Marylanders, living in a border state and contributing soldiers to both sides as well as experiencing the actual ebb and flow of battle from 1 862 through 1 864, 270CIVIL WAR HISTORY have expressed their sorrow, elation, and the remembrance of that trauma in numerous memorials. Beginning with the erection of the first one in honor of Capt. John P. Gleeson in 1 866, some sixty-five have been dedicated, the last one in 1 993 in honorofGen. Samuel Garland, Jr. As Susan Cooke Soderberg asserts, "Monuments are testaments to the important events and people of our national past and how we interpret them affects our national identity" (xi). In "Lest We Forget" she chronicles that expression in a book designed both as a guide and as a historical reference for "people interested in Maryland and in architectural history, and social historians" (vii). Reflective of commemorative monuments from the late nineteenth century until the 1920s, they bear the imprint of a "Renaissance aesthetic of beauty" (xxiii). The most popular forms were the statue of the solitary soldier and the obelisk embellished with romantic and classical inscriptions. Larger monuments , in demanding more intricate sculptures, as Soderberg asserts, "gave new life to artistic sculpture in America" (xxiv). Contrary to the assumption that the "soldier-at-parade-rest" was mass produced, the statue was actually tailored from a standard model to meet local demands. By 19 15 the number of companies engaged in their production had grown to sixty-three. Soderberg sees three...

While the number of ongoing civil wars increased in roughly consistent fashion through-out the Cold War period, they appear to be decreasing in the post-Cold War period. What explains this reversal in trends? In this paper, I show how sensitivity to the polarity of the international system can be leveraged to draw new inferences about civil war duration. I assess the proposition that post-Cold War civil wars are terminating faster than Cold War era civil wars, outlining a theoretical justi cation for why bipolar international systems should prolong intrastate conflicts, but unipolar systems should not. Empirically, I combine matching techniques with duration analyses and identify a signi cant and robust relation-ship between the bipolar period and civil war duration: post-Cold War civil wars are shown to be less than half as long as Cold War era conflicts, a result which I argue highlights the critical influence of systemic factors on intrastate conflicts.

PATH DEPENDENCE IN INTRASTATE CONFLICTS: RESOURCES, REGIMES, AND INTERVENTIONS Ivan Medynskyi Old Dominion University, 2015 Director: Dr. David C. Earnest This dissertation investigates the patterns of path dependence in intrastate conflicts. It is motivated by three research questions: What factors determine a particular outcome of a civil war? How strong is their impact? What are the causal mechanisms in play? To examine these questions, this study introduces a theory of path dependence to the study of intrastate conflicts that bridges the gap between analyses of the phases of contention. First, it examines the broad understanding of path dependence that highlights the impact of initial conditions on civil war outcomes. Then, this dissertation explores the narrower notion which focuses on the role of timing and sequence of internal factors and intervening events in shaping different resolutions to intrastate conflicts. Using multinomial logistic regression and event history models to analyze initial conditions, intrinsic features, and intervening factors in influencing the probability of particular civil war outcomes, this study identifies relevant agencies that can be utilized to shape solutions for current and future instances of armed civil conflicts. Finally, three case studies test the applicability of the path dependence theory through outlining the narratives, incorporating quantitative findings, and identifying causal mechanisms. The empirical findings of the initial conditions models emphasize the relevance of conflict spillover, non-lootable resources, and structure of bipolarity. An investigation into the factors that ‘lock in’ a particular civil war outcome highlights the role of UN and regional intergovernmental organizations in accelerating a compromise outcome; explains the variation in dynamics behind democratic and autocratic regimes; but surprisingly finds no support for the relationship between the size of the armed forces and conflict outcome. Although case study analysis supports the validity of the empirical results, it also points at the potential limitations of the quantitative design. Since this study follows a mixed methods approach, it effectively compensates for the drawbacks of different types of analysis.

This intriguing study examines the truth behind the myths and misconceptions that defined the American Civil War, as portrayed through the popular literary works of the time. The Civil War Era: A Historical Exploration of Literature examines the tremendous change the American Civil War brought to society as reflected in the literature of the time. It delves into the cultural, historical, and literary contexts of the era, looking beyond common conceptions and instead reflecting on the era's complexities and contradictions. The book profiles key American literature related to the war, both on and off the battlefield, including Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, Ambrose Bierce's "Chickamauga," Louisa May Alcott's Hospital Sketches, the Civil War poems of Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, and Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address." This book serves to demonstrate how profoundly the actions on the Civil War battlefield shaped American politics, society, and the arts.

Reviewed by: Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation by Caroline E. Janney David E. Goldberg Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation. By Caroline E. Janney. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Pp. ix, 464.) Since its publication more than a decade ago, David Blight’s acclaimed Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory has gone for the most part unchallenged by scholars of Civil War memory. In the years that have followed, an exhaustive list of works have expounded upon, consolidated, and sometimes subtly questioned Blight’s assertion that Americans learned to forget the war by learning to forgive. Through monument building, plantation tours, and even marriage, citizens in the North and South chose to disregard the “hard hand of war” by embracing the sentimental notions of valor, heroism, and sacrifice. While Caroline Janney’s Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation examines many of these now familiar ritualistic and commemorative public sites, hers is the first comprehensive reassessment of Civil War memory. Spanning the first seventy-five years of the postwar period, she investigates the painstaking efforts Americans undertook to refuse the sentimentality of reconciliation. Remembering the Civil War is most impressive for its ability to unpack terms that have now become so synonymous with one another that they have seemingly lost all appropriate historical connection to their time. While many scholars have often used the terms “reunion” and “reconciliation” or “race” and “slavery” interchangeably, those who undertook the work of memorializing and debating the war did not. Reunion, Janney reminds us, was accomplished rather quickly, first in 1865, and later consolidated during Reconstruction. Yet, while former soldiers returned to commemorate past battles, their returning did not mean that they reconciled the war’s most divisive political disputes. According to Blight and others, reconciliation triumphed because many Americans learned to embrace a shared commitment to white supremacy, which helped neutralize sectional animosities and political differences. Janney challenges these assumptions by carefully surveying the pervasiveness of Unionist sentiments well into the twentieth century. Indeed, Remembering the Civil War extends the plot of Gary Gallagher’s recent book The Union War and Chandra Manning’s What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War by examining the diverse ways that Northern citizens retained the emancipationist legacy of the [End Page 94] Civil War despite their lingering support for Reconstruction and civil rights by the late nineteenth century. In countless ceremonies and dedications, former Union soldiers made clear that the demise of slavery was both the objective and achievement of the war, a triumph that could not be expunged despite the inescapable Northern commitment to white supremacy. Janney’s book also provides an opportunity to remember that debates over the Civil War’s meaning were as much between blacks and whites as they were between North and South. The ways in which Northerners learned to embrace segregation without forgetting emancipation is critical to understanding not only the distinctions between race and slavery that Janney so aptly describes, but is also crucial to examining how segregation unfolded and operated in the post–Civil War North. While many scholars have stressed a continuous white supremacy in their characterizations of Northern style Jim Crow, Remembering the Civil War reminds us that de facto segregation—as both an idea and a practice—endured because of the savvy and clever ways white Northerners contained and manipulated the historical narrative in their attempts to control social relations and economic rights in the public sphere. Finally, Remembering the Civil War provides an opportunity to rethink how we approach historical memory. Historians interested in Civil War memory might do well to leave behind the more popular ceremonial sites that have become all too predictable in discussions of reunion and reconciliation. Indeed, one might conclude that battlefields, plantation houses, and monuments are only temporary political artifacts and locations that tell us very little about how most citizens retained the Civil War’s enduring meanings. Most often, at these places citizens and tourists confront the war’s political disputes and legacy in short encounters, while more sustaining debates about the conflict play out in...