Project description
The civil war phenomenon in 20th century Europe
Numerous civil wars occurred in Europe between 1914 and 1949. However, despite the many analyses and the literature that emerged regarding these wars, little comparative work has been conducted about them. The EU-funded CivilWars project aims to change this by challenging exceptionalist approaches to civil war. It argues that these wars can only be fully understood as a phenomenon within a pan-European context and not as exclusive, unique incidents. CivilWars will explore the origins, courses and legacies of civil wars in Europe, particularly Russian, Finnish, Irish, Spanish and Greek. The work will provide an answer as to why so many civil wars took place in Europe in the first half of the 20th century.
Objective
In the first half of the twentieth century, Europe experienced an unparalleled number of civil wars resulting in millions of deaths. Civil war, as much as inter-state war, was a defining feature of the period for many European societies, from Ireland in the west and Russia in the east, to Finland in the north and Spain and Greece in the south. Since the 1990s, a rich and increasingly sophisticated body of literature has emerged on individual incidents of civil war, ranging from military studies to social and cultural analyses. However, remarkably little comparative work has been undertaken on civil wars in this period. Even fewer studies have explored the connections between them – be it transfers of people, ideas, or practices – beyond their ideological tropes. This has resulted in a tacit assumption of exceptionalism, whereby each civil war is assumed to have been unique and self-perpetuating without any serious attempt to explain why that was so. This project challenges exceptionalist approaches to civil war. While it recognises that significant differences in causes, forms, and/or aftermaths existed between individual civil wars, it argues that those civil wars can only be fully understood as a phenomenon within a pan-European context. The project will therefore investigate the origins, courses, and legacies of European civil wars through a fully integrated team of scholars with complementary expertise on the Russian, Finnish, Irish, Spanish and Greek cases. This will enable comparison between these different conflicts, but it will also go beyond the nation-centric tendencies of comparative approaches to arrive at a better understanding of what made the first half of the twentieth century an era of civil wars in Europe.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-AG - HORIZON Action Grant Budget-BasedHost institution
4 Dublin
Ireland