Why Onset Matters: Warfare, Intensity, and Duration in Civil War

Benoit Siberdt

Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2025, vol. 69, issue 7-8, 1372-1406

Abstract: Are civil wars shaped by how they start? While existing literature points to the path-dependent nature of conflict, the link between the type of onset and wartime dynamics have been largely overlooked. Building on a recent typology capturing the dynamics of civil war onset (1944–2020), I analyze conflict trajectories, focusing on three macro-level wartime dynamics: warfare, intensity, and duration. This article shows that how large-scale armed conflicts begin (e.g., whether they start as peripheral conflicts or are fought centrally) helps us predict how intensely they will be fought or how long they will last. These findings show that onset matters beyond signaling the start of large-scale conflict and tells us about the dynamics that will likely follow. Altogether, this article establishes a new process-oriented macro-level research program in the field of conflict analysis.

Keywords: onset; civil war; warfare; intensity; duration; conflict (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00220027241293715 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:jocore:v:69:y:2025:i:7-8:p:1372-1406

DOI: 10.1177/00220027241293715

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Conflict Resolution from Peace Science Society (International)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().