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.
Chapter 8 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Edited by:
Yiannis Kokosalakis,
Francisco J. Leira-Castiñeira
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
Weight: 780g
ISBN: 9781032307138
ISBN 10: 1032307137
Pages: 314
Publication Date: 31 March 2025
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Primary
,
Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Foreword Introduction: Civil War in Word and Deed: Dimensions of violence in Europe’s Age of Civil Wars Part I: Contextual Aspects of Violence 1. Civil War as the Graveyard of Revolution in Europe, 1917-1923 2. “Civil War” in Modern France: A Historical Genealogy from Discursive Violence to Physical Killing 3. Was There a Balkan Civil War? 4. “Kill or Be Killed”: Psychological Approaches to Decision-Making and Moral Judgements in Wartime 5. Defining the Enemy: Propaganda in a Civil War 6. Brutality in Civil Wars: Sociological Reflections Part II: Political Discourse and Propaganda 7. ‘Corpulent plutocrats’ versus ‘scheming Jews’: Propaganda and Violence in the Russian Civil War 8. Enemy Images, Group Experiences and Propaganda in the Finnish Civil War, 1918 9. “There can be no compromise”: The Propaganda of the Irish Civil War 10. “The war of words”: Propaganda during the Spanish Civil War 11. Patriots, Traitors, and Rebels: Mutual Portraits of Partisans and Fascists in the Italian Civil War, 1943-1945 12. Political Discourse and Propaganda during the Greek Civil War Part III: Physical Violence 13. The Lynching of Naval Officers by Seamen: Myth and Reality of Violence during the Russian Revolution, 1917-1918 14. Citizens at War: Mobilization, Militarization, and Atrocities in the Finnish Civil War and Beyond 15. Violence in the Irish Civil War 16. “We Were Real Beasts”: From ‘Ordinary Men’ to Combatants in Spain, 1936-1939 17. The Italian Civil War: An Explosion of Brutality 18. The Logic of Violence during the Greek Civil War, 1946-1949
Yiannis Kokosalakis is a guest researcher 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 the Ramón y Cajal Fellow at Charles III University of Madrid, Spain. He is the 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).
Reviews for Violence and Propaganda in European Civil Wars: Dimensions of Conflict, 1917–1949
“Bringing together theoretical discussions of intrastate violence and empirical studies of conflicts in Russia, Finland, Ireland, Spain, Italy, and Greece, Propaganda and Violence offers a nuanced, multidisciplinary examination of the relationship between dehumanizing propaganda and the brutal realities of European civil wars. Contributors highlight both the utility of historical comparison and necessity of attending to the specific and varied personal, social, political, and ideological factors that generated violence in particular cases”. Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, West Chester University, USA“Why were Europe’s civil wars in the first half of the twentieth century often so violent? This important and ambitious volume analyses the ideological, political and social factors that generated these cultures of intense violence”. Martin Conway, University of Oxford, UK
