Η συγκριτική μελέτη των εμφυλίων πολέμων

Abstract

The recent advances in the study of the causes of civil wars, especially under the research umbrella of political science, do not seem to have influenced the Greek research community. The latter ignores both the findings and the weaknesses of the relevant literature. At the same time, the research practices followed by the leading scholars in the field have not been integrated in the work produced by Greek scholars. Many studies on the Greek civil war would benefit from such an exposure to other cases of civil wars and novel methodological approaches. In this article, I discuss the conceptual problems involved in our effort to define the dependent variable, namely civil war, the formulation of a new operational definition, and the new fields of investigation that emerge from it. Going beyond the pointless divide between political science and the classic historiographical method, I emphasize the contributions of the comparative method in our efforts to empirically test falsifiable hypotheses. Finally, I present the main findings in the literature on civil wars from both macro- and micro-level studies and I bridge the disjunction between the two by demonstrating their complementarity.