Project

Civil Wars, Violence, and International Responses

Overview

The current decade has witnessed the dramatic resurgence of civil wars and the devastating humanitarian consequences they inflict on vulnerable people, societies, and states. With over 10 million people starving and 3 million seeking asylum and protection overseas, Yemen and Syria stand as powerful reminders of the obsolescence and inadequacy of the current international approach to conflict management and resolution.

Drawing on the Academy’s convening power across disciplines, the initiative has two broad goals:

  • To examine the trans-national security threats emanating from civil wars and weak states, and
  • To identify policy options for mitigating these threats and for addressing civil wars where US national security interests are at stake.

Read more about civil wars, and the policy questions driving the project

Main findings and policy implications

Learn more about the Civil Wars, Violence, and International Responses Project from project contributors

 

People

People

Project Chairs
Members

James D. Fearon

Stanford University
Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences,
Academy Member

Sumit Kumar Ganguly

Indiana University
Tagore Professor of Indian Cultures and Civilizations; Professor of Political Science
Academy Member

Barry R. Posen

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Director, MIT Security Studies Program; Ford International Professor of Political Science
Academy Member

Paul H. Wise

Stanford University
E. Behrman Professor of Child Health and Society
Academy Member
Publications

Publications

News & Updates

News & Updates

Events

Events

Project Outcomes

Project Outcomes

This project produced a two-volume Special Issue of the Academy’s journal Dædalus. The first volume, published in Fall 2017, focused on empirical evidence, explanatory frameworks, and identifying the threats that emanate from civil wars and weak states. The second volume focused on international responses and policy options and was published in Winter 2018. Still, there remain important questions about threats to U.S. interests and world order posed by the breakdown of state control and civil wars, including terrorism (and the employment of WMD), the spread of conflicts fueled by the involvement of outside powers, destabilizing refugee flows, and pandemics. In the current political environment, these are issues of interest to a broad audience, both domestic and international. Drawing on the Academy’s convening power across disciplines, this project seeks not only to contribute to current policy-making but also to contextualize current trends by building a larger conceptual understanding of the threats posed by the collapse of state authority associated with civil wars.

Since 2015, the Academy project team has engaged with a wide range of scholar and policy communities, including the UN, to discuss the main findings of the project in order to inform policymaking processes. In 2021, project cochairs Karl W. Eikenberry and Stephen Krasner published “Good Enough” Governance: Humility and the Limits of Foreign Intervention in Response to Civil Wars and Intrastate Violence, which presents a synthesis of the project’s research as well as key findings from these outreach activities.

Read more about project outcomes, outreach, and activities