Civil war was the most extreme, cruel and widespread form of violence during much of the twentieth century. Its hurricane-like vortex devastated countries, split nations and destroyed communities in Europe, Asia, Africa and America. No other tool worked better for unleashing revolutions or repelling them, building nations, expelling ethnic or political minorities, securing territorial domains and economic resources, annihilating internal enemies, creating orphans and widows and generating human suffering. Since the end of the era of major international conflicts in the middle of the twentieth century, civil wars have become the most recurrent type of armed conflict in the world. With more than 20 million victims and 65 million refugees since 1945, it is difficult to dispute their primacy in the hierarchy of contemporary terror.

Civil Wars traces the history of civil wars in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, arguing that civil wars have played a key role in shaping the world in which we live today. It analyses a multitude of civil wars in different countries and regions of the world, including Russia, Finland, Ireland, Spain, Italy, China, Yugoslavia, Greece, Korea, Indochina, Guatemala, Congo, Rwanda, Sudan, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Iraq and Syria. Through these case studies, the authors seek to identify elements intrinsic to civil war, such as its transnational nature, the contagion effect, recurrent conflict and extreme violence against civilians, in order to identify the cycles of civil war that shaped the twentieth century and continue to shape the world today.

This book is the first to offer a global history of civil wars in the hundred years from 1917 to 2017: the century of terror and genocide, but also the century of civil wars. It will be of interest to a wide readership interested in war and conflict in the modern world, as well as to students and scholars of war and of modern history.