Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Peer review/Civil war

Civil war
I have been expanding this article, off and on, for the past couple months using books on my shelf and no longer have any bright ideas on what to add. Given the extremely general nature of the topic, I have relied heavily on statistical studies, which are not usually considered gripping reading. I would appreciate, in particular, constructive criticism on if I've managed to discuss the statistics in a readable way and suggestions on what else people want to know about this type of war, though people are of course free to comment on anything they wish. Thanks, BanyanTree 02:18, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Randomran
Kudos for taking on a difficult but important topic. I encounter a lot of similar challenges when I try to do the same thing with abstract topics in video games. (Much easier to focus on a specific civil war, isn't it?) So when I put out these comments, I just want to let you know that I'm really sympathetic to how difficult it is to research an article like this.
 * I wouldn't say "take on" so much as "sleepwalk into", but thanks for the comments. And yes, it's far far easier to write about a specific actual conflict than about a class of conflict. - BanyanTree 09:30, 29 December 2008 (UTC)


 * In the definition section you jump right into what the Geneva Conventions say. There's no context. The academic definitions should probably come first. And you'll probably need a suitable heading for the other definitions: (policy definitions? legal definitions?)
 * That's actually one of the few sections that largely survived after I got my grubby paws on the article. There were no academic definitions previously.  I've put the academics first, cut down the other definitions and put them under "further definitions".  On a second look, I couldn't figure out why the article needed an indepth discussion of things that were not but are related to civil war, and might just end up cutting that entire "further" section later. - BanyanTree 09:30, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
 * In the "causes" section, you put a LOT of weight onto Collier, Hoeffler and Sambanis. Even if they're pretty reliable themselves, I don't think this will be enough to provide a comprehensive look at the causes. You could really use a wider number of sources to either confirm or criticize these viewpoints. Your goal should be to get away from attribution to any one single source, and instead achieve a WP:NPOV from no perspective in particular.
 * That's very true. Hopefully I, or someone else, will get around to the one redlink I insist on keeping in the article (despite attempts to at least one editor to 'fix' the redlink by delinking it), "greed versus grievance", which is generally how the two broad schools of civil war scholarship divide. The Collier-Hoeffler model, considered a massive assault by the "greed" school,  has certainly been the focus of much of the debate, with many of the "grievance" folks reduced to the rearguard action of insisting that identity issues form the basis of civil wars but are too complicated to be measured by statistics.  (I've actually read wider than the sources I used, but found these to have the most explanatory power, so I guess the minor role grievance explanation play in this article is my POV.)  - BanyanTree 09:30, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Even the other sections, for such an important topic, you could draw on a wider number of sources. I'm almost 100% sure that academics debate what is or isn't a civil war, and I'd really like to know where the debate usually ends up. I imagine there's less room for POV in merely summarizing the timing of several civil wars. But even here, there's some potentially controversial ideas when it comes to correlating civil wars with the cold war -- and it might help to have other sources confirm or elaborate on these ideas.
 * All good points. I will try to cast my net wider. There actually doesn't appear to be a lot of disagreement on a the number cutoff, probably because scholars can simply preface their work with "I'm using the 1000 casualties total criterion" or "I'm only counting 100 casualty per year conflicts where the rebel leader was left-handed" rather than coordinating a shared definition like us poor Wikipedia editors. The end of the Cold War situation is quite humorous in that it is quite clear from recent scholarship that the Cold War resulted in a dramatic drop in the number of civil wars over the next decade or so.  Nevertheless, many war scholars at the end of the Cold War, who apparently had been entirely focused on superpower conflict and now needed to find something else to do to earn a salary, had missed the steady buildup of ongoing civil wars over the previous decades and published widely disseminated and quoted works concluding that the end of the Cold War had caused the abnormally large number of observed civil wars. The more difficult argument is the one that Hironaka suggest by measuring explicit correlation between superpower/communist involvement and increased length.  I'll see what I can dig up and add.  - BanyanTree 09:30, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
 * I might like to know more about civil wars before the 19th century. (Or, if these wars weren't generally called civil wars, it would be important to clarify why. I'm not a historian, but if they generally don't classify the Roman civil wars as such, then it might be because of the lack of Nationalism.)
 * Yeah, the argument over if pre-nationalism states can be credibly compared with modern states been a major problem in political science, not just with this field of study. Also academics have only recently begun looking at the "ecology" of civil wars and how they are similar; previously most scholarly work took the shape of a study of a particular civil war and all of its peculiarities that made it different from every other war.  The major problem with the sort of statistical studies that these "ecology" studies rely on is the lack of data once you get back into even the beginning of the 20th century, e.g. demographics from census takers of the size of ethnic minority groups, accurate measures of miles of railroad track per capita (used as a proxy for government strength), etc.  Several of the measures that Hironaka used for post-WWII wars simply aren't available for the earlier wars she discusses, and are omitted.  Nevertheless, I'm sure someone has taken a stab at it and I'll see what I can find. - BanyanTree 09:30, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Otherwise, the article is generally well-written and clear. The statistics are incorporated in a pretty readable way. I think you might go into too much detail at some points, but that's the kind of thing that comes from researching a wider variety of sources. They'll quickly show you what the major points are.

Research, research, research. Randomran (talk) 04:19, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your comments. It'll take me a while to work on your suggestions but I hope you'll have a chance to go back over the article when I feel it's ready for another round of review. - BanyanTree 09:30, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Sounds good. I mostly stick to WP:VG, but before I ended up there I used to poke in and around some historical and political articles. Feel free to seek me out directly whenever you're ready for the next round of review. Randomran (talk) 15:37, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Patar knight
Alright, this is my first peer review, so don't complain about it. :p A couple of points
 * Wait, I thought the whole point of Wikipedia was to provide a forum for people to complain about every possible topic. Oh yeah, and also something to do with an encyclopedia.  ;) - BanyanTree 23:56, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
 * But of course, why else do we so many articles with criticism sections? And all those edit wars, and talk pages to argue on. In fact, one of our core policies, Ignore all rules, seems to be the very recipe for anarchy! Indeed, this is no encyclopedia. ;) --Patar knight - chat/contributions 03:18, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

That's all I have to say for now. It's a better article than I expected from so complex a topic. --Patar knight - chat/contributions 23:09, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
 * The greed versus grievance link in the introduction really stands out. Perhaps it'll be better to just remove it?
 * I notice more recent editors tends to share this view. I see redlinks as invitations, and an article without redlinks to be rather melancholic, as there's no avenue for sudden expansion into new related topics.  I have and continue to strongly defend that redlink, in the expectation that either I or someone else take up the invitation. - BanyanTree 23:56, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Okay, seems reasonable. It just really stands out. But hey, if that results in a new article, everyone wins. --Patar knight - chat/contributions 03:18, 30 December 2008 (UTC)
 * All the pictures line up on the right-hand of the page, making it seem visually unbalanced. Some of them could probably be moved to the left hand side without a problem.
 * I'll experiment and see how it looks staggered. - BanyanTree 23:56, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
 * 'Kay. --Patar knight - chat/contributions 03:18, 30 December 2008 (UTC)
 * 25 out of the 41 inline citations refer to Hironoka, and another 9 point towards Collier, Hoeffler and Sambanis, while one inline citation points to both of them, bringing the total to 35/41 inline citations being attributed to two sources. However, in your bibliography, there are far more sources, so this shouldn't be hard to fix.
 * Actually, the bibliography was added before I started working on the article, though there's little evidence that the sources listed were actually used in the article. I have a feeling someone just copied a bibliography from somewhere.  One of the recurring critiques I'm hearing is about the lack of diversity in sources and I'll certainly make that a priority. - BanyanTree 23:56, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
 * That would explain it. It would be unusual for someone to leave the task half-done, with all of those sources available. --Patar knight - chat/contributions 03:18, 30 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your comments. - BanyanTree 23:56, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
 * No problem, it was my pleasure. Thanks for not biting. --Patar knight - chat/contributions 03:18, 30 December 2008 (UTC)


 * Is there only the Collier-Hoeffler model and must one party be always the state? Wandalstouring (talk) 09:59, 31 December 2008 (UTC)
 * No, the Collier-Hoeffler model changed the way people approached the subject because nobody seems to have done a massive statistical study to examine the causes of civil wars before. As such, there are many many scholars who have built on the C-H framework to refine or modify its conclusions.  Alternately, those who hold that grievance better explains the cause of civil wars, in particular those who hold that ethnic conflict is both fundamentally different from and worse than other types of conflict, have been busy trying to blow holes in the C-H model or find proxy measures that would prove their point through the C-H framework.  While I've been expecting a need for greed versus grievance, it may be worth creating Collier-Hoeffler Model as well.  In any case, this points to the need for more sources so readers can see the back and forth.
 * The Geneva Convention Protocol II on Protection of Victims of Non-International Armed Conflicts mentions "the territory of a High Contracting Party between its armed forces", while Hironaka's definition, which I've used in the lede, requires the state as a belligerent. However, the Geneva Conventions were written for states that would sign on, and Hironaka spends a long time pointing out that the whole idea that all of the ex-colonial states are the same structurally as the older states is absurd.  That said, even in a collapsed state like Somalia, there are still centers of power that claim that they are legitimate.  (Tangentially, one could imagine that the 'autonomous regions' described in Consolidation of states within Somalia (1998–2006) would have been relatively quickly seen as legitimate states in an international system like that of 18th century Europe.) James Fearon, whose definition I use to lead off the definition section, doesn't mention a state at all, which may be more intuitive for people, as several people have tried to change the lead to make it more general.
 * Thanks for the comment. - BanyanTree 02:25, 1 January 2009 (UTC)