More than two hundred wars have been fought in the past half century. Nearly all have been civil wars, and at the beginning of the twenty-first century, more than thirty civil wars were being fought. The rules of interstate war do not apply; each atrocity provokes retribution, and civil war takes on a brutal dynamic of its own. Civil War, Civil Peace challenges common but simplistic explanations of war, including greed, gender, and long-standing religious or ethnic hatreds, which ignore that these groups have lived together in peace for centuries.
When a cease-fire is arranged, aid...