Violence and Propaganda in European Civil Wars: Dimensions of Conflict, 1917-1949

This volume offers a broad overview of the conditions, motives, and practices of violence during the most prominent intra-state conflicts in Europe during the first half of the 20th century.

This book seeks to move beyond accounts of civil war violence that focus on microlevel motives or grand cleavages, arguing instead that violence is best examined as a multidimensional phenomenon involving a range of structural, personal, and conjectural factors operating at various levels of societal interaction. Making a case for methodological pluralism, the volume brings together an interdisciplinary team of historians and social scientists to address the aspects of civil war violence from a broad range of empirical and methodological perspectives. The book consists of three thematic sections. The first section covers contextual issues related to civil war violence, including the role of ideology and social dynamics. The second and third sections comprise empirical case studies that examine the dimensions of violence in six prominent European civil wars. The volume focuses on these particular conflicts because they are almost universally recognized as instances of civil war, and this enables the volume to maintain its analytical focus on the dynamics of violence.

This book will be of much interest to students of European history, civil wars, political violence, and International Relations in general.

Yiannis Kokosalakis is a research associate at Bielefeld University, Germany. He is the author of Building Socialism: The Communist Party and the Making of the Soviet System, 1921-1941 (2023).

Francisco J. Leira-Castiñeira is Ramón y Cajal Fellow at Charles III University of Madrid, Spain. He is author of Franco’s Soldiers. Recruitment and Combat in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) (2023), and co-editor of The Crucible of Francoism (2021).