Civil Wars in History
University College Dublin, 10/11 September 2021
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Call for Papers:
Deadline 1st February 2021
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The Centre for War Studies, University College Dublin (https://www.ucd.ie/warstudies), in collaboration with the Society for the History of War, invites proposals for a conference on the global history of civil wars (c. 1500-2020).
Preference will be given to papers that either have a thematic focus and/or a comparative dimension (rather than being focused on one particular national case study).
Confirmed keynote speakers include Professor Stathis Kalyvas (Oxford), Professor Penny Roberts (Warwick) and Professor Kirsten Weld (Harvard).
Civil war, or violent confrontation within a single political unit, is one of the oldest forms of armed conflict. It features prominently, for example, in the classical works of Thucydides and Tacitus, always as a stark warning that war within a state or community ought to be avoided at all costs because of its particularly disruptive and destructive nature.
Despite much scholarly attention to the widespread phenomenon of internal armed conflicts, comparative histories of civil wars remain a remarkably under-developed area of historical enquiry. While political scientists have paid much attention to civil wars after 1990, often from a comparative perspective, historians have tended to study particular cases of internal conflict such as the Irish Civil War, the American Civil War, the Chinese Civil War, the Russian Civil War or the Spanish Civil War. Instead of considering the origins, forms, and consequences of civil wars across time and space, historians have preferred the reconstruction of historical particularity over analysis of potential connections or similarities between individual cases.
We therefore invite scholars interested in any aspect of civil wars, from the medieval period to the present day, to submit proposals for papers or panels, provided that their papers / panels offer a comparative or transnational perspective that will allow us to gain new insights into similarities and differences between civil wars across time and space.
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The submission guidelines and full details can be downloaded here.
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Any questions about the Call for Papers can be directed to history@ucd.ie.
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If the conference is held as a face-to-face event, there will be a conference fee of approximately EUR 90 to cover the cost of lunches, tea/coffee breaks, and a drinks reception.
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A conference fee of 15 EUR will be charged if the conference is held as an online event. This is to offset the cost of e-ticketing and VAT.
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