Civil wars are the dominant form of violence in the contemporary international system, yet they are anything but local affairs. This book explores the border-crossing features of such wars by bringing together insights from international relations theory, sociology, and transnational politics with a rich comparative-quantitative literature. It highlights the causal mechanisms - framing, resource mobilization, socialization, among others - that link the international and transnational to the local, emphasizing the methods required to measure them. Contributors examine specific mechanisms leading to particular outcomes in civil conflicts ranging from Chechnya, to Afghanistan, to Sudan, to Turkey. Transnational Dynamics of Civil War thus provides a significant contribution to debates motivating the broader move to mechanism-based forms of explanation, and will engage students and researchers of international relations, comparative politics, and conflict processes.

Editor

Jeffrey T. Checkel, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia

Jeffrey T. Checkel is Professor of International Studies and Simons Chair in International Law and Human Security at Simon Fraser University and Research Professor in the Centre for the Study of Civil War at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). He has published extensively in leading European and North American journals and is the author of Ideas and International Political Change: Soviet/Russian Behavior and the End of the Cold War (1997), editor of International Institutions and Socialization in Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and co-editor (with Peter J. Katzenstein) of European Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Contributors

Jeffrey T. Checkel, Kristin M. Bakke, Fiona B. Adamson, Kristian Berg Harpviken, Sarah Kenyon Lischer, Hans Peter Schmitz, Stephan Hamberg, Martin Austvoll Nome, Nils B. Weidmann, Andrew Bennett, Elisabeth Jean Wood