Scientific Essay from the year 2010 in the subject Politics - Political Theory and the History of Ideas Journal, grade: 90%, Dublin City University, course: International Relations, language: English, abstract: Civil War Onset and the 'Third Debate': a Positivist versus Post-Positivist Approach According to Yosef Lapid (1989: 236), International Relations, by the end of the 1980's was "in the midst of a third discipline-defining debate," between positivism and post-positivism. Scholars studying the phenomenon of civil war and its causes seem to have been largely exempt from this debate. There...