This volume offers a broad overview of the conditions, motives, and practices of violence during the most prominent intrastate 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.
Arvustused
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, USAWhy were Europes 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
Foreword Introduction: Civil War in Word and Deed: Dimensions of
violence in Europes 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, 19211941 (2023).
Francisco J. LeiraCastiñeira is the Ramón y Cajal Fellow at Charles III University of Madrid, Spain. He is the author of Francos Soldiers: Recruitment and Combat in the Spanish Civil War (19361939) (2023) and coeditor of The Crucible of Francoism (2021).
