Anastasia Shesterinina
Last week concluded a series of activities and events that wrapped up the first four years of the Civil War Paths project. This year we invited international interdisciplinary experts on the cases of Colombia, Lebanon, Nepal, and South Sudan where the Civil War Paths research team members conducted immersive fieldwork over the past three years to interrogate the analysis that emerged from this fieldwork. Hosted in York, the Civil War Paths Workshop showcased the participants’ latest research, pointing to avenues for future collaboration. We also engaged with the work of the Fellows of the Centre for the Comparative Study of Civil War at our Annual Civil War Paths Conference, which focused on intra- and inter-group relations of armed groups, as well as the British International Studies Association Conference 2024 panel and 2025 roundtable on relational approaches to civil war. And we deepened our existing collaborations through co-authored publications on familial ties and armed conflict, protection in war, and research ethics, among others. Overall, the theme of relationality emerged prominently through these conversations, and we have planned further engagements to extend this discussion over the next year.
Blog Series on Relational Approaches to Civil War
Our Blog Series on this theme highlighted findings from a range of projects carried out by the Civil War Paths Fellows. These contributions zoomed into questions of relations within and between armed groups and other actors involved in civil wars. They addressed the impact of political education within armed groups and their use of rebel governance practices for self-legitimation, rhetorical cooperation between these groups, their revenue generation with communities and private actors, particularly corporations, as well as the role of gender framing in external support for these groups. Combined, these contributions expose “systems of relationships” that develop during civil wars. But Fellows’ research also spans beyond wartime to identify continuities and discontinuities of conflict dynamics after war. The approach to civil war as a social process that incorporates dynamics of conflict from pre- to post-war periods is reflected in the contributions on micro-dynamics of conflict pre- and post-peace agreement with the FARC-EP in Colombia, ex-combatant disappointment and remobilisation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the realities of autonomy after civil wars, including women ex-combatants’ participation in peacebuilding in the Bangsamoro, and peace prospects in Ukraine. More broadly, Fellows call for exchange between different strands of research on political violence and between academia and activism as we address questions of relationality.
Congratulations to Research Team Members
Finally, we welcomed Sadeen Haddad to the team as a Research Associate on the project and celebrated a number of achievements among the team members, not least Dr Sayra van den Berg’s Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding Innovation Prize, which was awarded in 2024 for her article “Untold Stories: Ex-Combatant Silences in Sierra Leone’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” and Dr Toni Rouhana’s Tenure-Track Assistant Professor of Sociology position at New Mexico State University, starting in Fall 2025. Not to worry, Toni will be staying on as an Affiliate on the project and will be actively involved in future research and activities!
Taking Stock
As we have reflected on how far we have come since the beginning of the project, we have also identified important questions and areas for development. Bringing together insights from different contexts on such complex topics as the social process of civil war is difficult enough when following a fixed research design. However, as we discuss in a recent publication, our research design was not fixed but evolved in relation to our collective conceptualisation and findings from fieldwork in the selected contexts. While we view this as a strength and define flexibility in research design as an ethical practice, it also poses challenges of comparability across our diverse cases. Our coordinated fieldwork based on careful adaptation of life history interviews, a key method in this project, to the sensitivities and particularities of the cases—and the observation that this method resonated with most of our research participants—helps us ground the comparison going forward in ways that reflect lived experiences of conflict across our field sites. The second challenge is that of aggregating insights from individual experiences to the overarching trajectories of civil war. How lived realities of the very participants in the civil wars that we study illuminate broader conflict dynamics is the main question to which we are turning now. Stay tuned for further updates!
