Content area
Full text
Publisher: ABC-Clio, Santa Barbara, CA and Oxford, 2007, $195.
ISBN: 978 1 85109 919 1. Also available as an e-book (ISBN 978 1 85109 920 7 $245) (print and e-book $345)
According to the scene-setting and thoughtful Introduction to this work, drawing on an article in the prestigious Journal of Peace Research ([1] Gleditsch et al. , 2002), there have been 225 armed conflicts since 1945 163 of which could be defined as intra rather than inter-state. These have taken the lives of an estimated 20 million people, far more than have been lost in inter-state conflicts during the same period. As the Introduction further expounds, separating intra-state and inter-state conflicts is problematic as many civil wars, such as that in Korea between 1950 and 1953, had an international dimension involving other states. Here the recent work of [2] Sambanis (2004) is drawn on to provide a ten-point definition of civil war. This allows for the inclusion of many of the post 1945 internal wars one would expect, such as the Communist-Nationalist struggle in China between 1946 and 1949 which was by far the most deadly, along with lesser known but still costly conflicts, such as that which cleaved Tajikistan between 1992...