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Civil wars constitute an element without which the history of humanity is incomprehensible. Since 1917, they alone claimed some 20 million lives and displaced 67 million people, standing alone as the undisputed primary form of armed conflict worldwide since the end of the Second World War. Their definition is crucial to understand them and to place them within intrastate and transnational policies. However, in its definition, the historical dimension has been systematically undervalued. In this paper, we address both a history of the concept and the elements that, in our opinion, help defining civil wars in historical terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The category of 'military labour' has traditionally been used to designate 'combat labour' – the labour of soldiers. Focusing on the case of early modern South Asia, the present essay argues that this equivalence is misplaced and that it is a product of a distorted view of war defined primarily in terms of combat. The essay discusses the roles played by the logistical workforce of Mughal armies in conducting military campaigns and facilitating imperial expansion. It calls for broadening the category of 'military labour' to include all types of labour rendered consciously towards the fulfilment of military objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his fourth essay, the author describes the Turanian military tradition of Inner Asia and its relationship to the Iranian tradition, on the basis of topoi both from literature of West Asia, Europe, and China and from the very few 'Turanian' sources [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author gives a description of the arms, armour, infantry, and servants of the Iranian military tradition of West Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article the author models the Iranian military tradition of west Asia on the basis of the Roman literature of the early Byzantine period and the Arabic and Persian literature of the Muslim period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article the author rejects the common model for the description of pre-modern warfare as a constant process of technological advances, and argues that both the sources and the pictorial and archaeological record seem to show that, during the period and in the region under consideration, warfare remained essentially unchanged. He postulates the existence of two military traditions, the ‘Turanian’ tradition of the pastoral nomads of Inner Asia and the ‘Iranian’ tradition of sedentary populations under the nomad influence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]