Where Do We Go From Here? Conceptual, Theoretical, and Methodological Gaps in the Civil War Research Program.

Since the early 1990s, the civil war research program has been a vibrant one, but has reached an analytical 'plateau' because purely methodological issues have tended to obscure fundamental conceptual and theoretical concerns. The existing large-N 'groundclearing' work has shed important light on macro- and micro-level determinants of internal conflict onset, duration, and termination, but has left the field theoretically impoverished. This paper argues that conceptual and theoretical questions need to predate methodological ones, and discusses at length remaining gaps in the civil war literature. Six main lacunae are identified. First, we need a better conceptualization of civil war in terms of its starting and ending points - civil war may be a longer process, with waves of escalation and de-escalation, than generally described in the extant literature. Second, existing theories conflate civil conflict with violence - war onset and violence may be conceptually distinct. Third, we need better theories of ethnic civil war that define the phenomenon independently of its causes. Fourth, we lack truly systemic-level theories of civil war onset and duration. Fifth, we need better theories that allow us to determine whether civil wars are actually distinct from other types of wars. Finally, we need to go beyond state-centric monadic approaches, and be more rigorous when building our models for explaining civil war onset, duration, or termination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]