Final Report Summary - LIMOD (The Limits of Demobilization, 1917-1923: Paramilitary Violence in Europe and the Wider World) Did the Great War really end in November 1918? The answer to this seemingly rhetorical question depends on geography. For the three combatant nations usually privileged in the literature (Britain, France and Germany), the answer is yes. If, however, we adopt a perspective that includes Eastern Europe and the wider world (both of which feature less prominently in the Western historical imagination), the issue is more complicated. For much of Eastern Europe, the “postwar” was even more violent than the war years, with more than 4 million deaths as a result of revolutions, wars, and civil wars between 1917 and the early 1920s. If we add the emergence of strong anti-colonial movements across the wider world, from Ireland to Egypt, Syria to India (and the colonial powers’ oppressive response), it seems justified to speak of a continuum of violence that characterized the transition from war to “peace” well into the 1920s. The LIMOD project investigated these conflicts empirically and comparatively, trying to draw out and explain why in some former combatant states violence continued until well after 1918 whereas in others the transition from war to peace was more successful. Researchers directly involved in the project contributed case studies as diverse as “Poland and Ireland”, “the Baltic States”, “the Balkans”, “the Ottoman Empire”, “Central Europe”, “India”, and “the Middle East” while our network of affiliated researchers covered all former combatant states from Japan and China to Latin America, from the United States to Australia. What has emerged from this project is a fuller picture of how societies worldwide exited the Great War, why violence was so wide-spread after 1918 and what the long-term-legacies were. Some key results of the project have been published in peer-reviewed articles, monographs and two edited books, War in Peace (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Empires at War, 1911-1923 (Oxford University Press, 2014). Further monographic outputs will be published in the new OUP book series, The Greater War, edited by LIMOD’s PI.
