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Burning Country
Syrians in Revolution and War
Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami
Pluto Press, 2018
"Explores how Syria’s peaceful uprising gave way to armed insurgency and sectarian jihad...a sympathetic portrait of a heroic uprising gone wrong, describing in all too painful detail the transformations wrought by armed groups and Assad’s brutality. This is an important, honest, and insightful book, well worth anyone’s time."―Washington Post

"Full of fascinating details about the early protest movements...lets us listen to many voices we aren’t likely to hear on the news."―New York Review of Books


In 2011, many Syrians took to the streets of Damascus to demand the overthrow of the government of Bashar al-Assad. By 2018, Syria had become a warzone. Burning Country explores the complicated reality of life in present-day Syria with unprecedented detail and sophistication, drawing on new firsthand testimonies from opposition fighters, exiles lost in an archipelago of refugee camps, and courageous human rights activists.

Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami expertly interweave these stories with an incisive analysis of the militarization of the uprising, the rise of the Islamists and sectarian warfare, and the role of Syria's government in exacerbating the brutalization of the conflict. Through these accounts and a broad range of secondary source material, the authors persuasively argue that the international community has failed in its stated commitments to support the Syrian opposition movements.

This edition brings the story up to the present, with a new chapter that covers the internationalization of the conflict, including interventions by the United States, Russia, and Iran; the rollback of ISIS; the fall of Daraya and Aleppo; the crushing of local democracy; sectarian cleansing; and the forced exile of millions of Syrians.
 
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Civil Wars
Caesar
Harvard University Press

Caesar (C. Iulius, 102–44 BCE), statesman and soldier, defied the dictator Sulla; served in the Mithridatic wars and in Spain; pushed his way in Roman politics as a 'democrat' against the senatorial government; was the real leader of the coalition with Pompey and Crassus; conquered all Gaul for Rome; attacked Britain twice; was forced into civil war; became master of the Roman world; and achieved wide-reaching reforms until his murder. We have his books of Commentarii (notes): eight on his wars in Gaul, 58–52 BC, including the two expeditions to Britain 55–54, and three on the civil war of 49–48. They are records of his own campaigns (with occasional digressions) in vigorous, direct, clear, unemotional style and in the third person, the account of the civil war being somewhat more impassioned.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Caesar is in three volumes. Volume I is his Gallic War. The Alexandrian War, the African War and the Spanish War, commonly ascribed to Caesar by our manuscripts but of uncertain authorship, are collected in Volume III.

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Civil Wars and Foreign Powers
Outside Intervention in Intrastate Conflict
Patrick M. Regan
University of Michigan Press, 2002
We have seen recent massive intervention by the United States and its allies in Europe in internal conflict in Bosnia and Kosovo. In Outside Intervention in Intrastate Conflict, Patrick Regan systematically answers the question about the conditions under which third parties intervene in civil conflicts to stop the fighting. It uses data on all civil conflicts since 1945 to identify those conflicts that are amenable to outside interventions and the types of interventions that are more likely to be successful.
Outside Intervention in Intrastate Conflict is a book about how governments can help facilitate the end of civil conflicts. In a time when internal conflicts appear to be increasing in number, and increasingly destabilizing, governments need to know what policies work and when. Interventions are generally of two sorts--unilateral, or when one state takes action, and multilateral, such as UN or NATO action. This book examines the conditions under which each form of intervention is most likely and most effective. The analysis suggests that three conditions associated with multi-lateral interventions will increase the likelihood of success: mutual consent of the parties involved; impartiality on the part of the intervenors; and the existence of a coherent intervention strategy. The questions are posed from the perspective of the decision maker and the answers offered are framed in a language familiar to the decision-making community. The book mixes descriptive case material with systematic statistical analysis of a unique data set of all civil conflicts since World War II, providing contemporary examples to illustrate overall trends in the data. Beyond the policy implications this work is also rich in theoretical development about issues of conflict and conflict management.
This book will appeal to students of international conflict, civil war, ethnic conflict, and those who are concerned with developing policy in the post-cold war world to deal with intrastate conflict.
Patrick M. Regan is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Binghamton University.
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Civil Wars, Civil Beings, and Civil Rights in Alabama's Black Belt
A History of Perry County
Bertis D. English, Foreword by Wayne Flynt
University of Alabama Press, 2020
Reconstruction politics and race relations between freed blacks and the white establishment in Perry County, Alabama
 
In his fascinating, in-depth study, Bertis D. English analyzes why Perry County, situated in the heart of a violence-prone subregion of Alabama, enjoyed more peaceful race relations and less bloodshed than several neighboring counties. Choosing an atypical locality as central to his study, English raises questions about factors affecting ethnic disturbances in the Black Belt and elsewhere in Alabama. He also uses Perry County, which he deems an anomalous county, to caution against the tendency of some scholars to make sweeping generalizations about entire regions and subregions.
 
English contends Perry County was a relatively tranquil place with a set of extremely influential African American businessmen, clergy, politicians, and other leaders during Reconstruction. Together with egalitarian or opportunistic white citizens, they headed a successful campaign for black agency and biracial cooperation that few counties in Alabama matched. English also illustrates how a significant number of educational institutions, a high density of African American residents, and an unusually organized and informed African American population were essential factors in forming Perry County’s character. He likewise traces the development of religion in Perry, the nineteenth-century Baptist capital of Alabama, and the emergence of civil rights in Perry, an underemphasized center of activism during the twentieth century.
 
This well-researched and comprehensive volume illuminates Perry County’s history from the various perspectives of its black, interracial, and white inhabitants, amplifying their own voices in a novel way. The narrative includes rich personal details about ordinary and affluent people, both free and unfree, creating a distinctive resource that will be useful to scholars as well as a reference that will serve the needs of students and general readers.
 
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Civil Wars, Civil Peace
An Introduction to Conflict Resolution
Kumar Rupesinghe and Sanam Naraghi Anderlini
Pluto Press, 1998

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Civil Wars
Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism
George C. Rable
University of Illinois Press, 1989
Born into a male-dominated society, southern women often chose to support patriarchy and their own celebrated roles as mothers, wives, and guardians of the home and humane values. George C. Rable uncovers the details of how women fit into the South's complex social order and how Southern social assumptions shaped their attitudes toward themselves, their families, and society as a whole. He reveals a bafflingly intricate social order and the ways the South's surprisingly diverse women shaped their own lives and minds despite strict boundaries. Paying particular attention to women during the Civil War, Roble illuminates their thoughts on the conflict and the threats and challenges they faced and looks at their place in both the economy and politics of the Confederacy. He also ranges back to the antebellum era and forward to postwar South, when women quickly acquiesced to the old patriarchal system but nonetheless lived lives changed forever by the war.
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Insurgent Women
Female Combatants in Civil Wars
Jessica Trisko Darden, Alexis Henshaw, and Ora Szekely
Georgetown University Press, 2019

Why do women go to war? Despite the reality that female combatants exist the world over, we still know relatively little about who these women are, what motivates them to take up arms, how they are utilized by armed groups, and what happens to them when war ends. This book uses three case studies to explore variation in women’s participation in nonstate armed groups in a range of contemporary political and social contexts: the civil war in Ukraine, the conflicts involving Kurdish groups in the Middle East, and the civil war in Colombia. In particular, the authors examine three important aspects of women’s participation in armed groups: mobilization, participation in combat, and conflict cessation. In doing so, they shed light on women’s pathways into and out of nonstate armed groups. They also address the implications of women’s participation in these conflicts for policy, including postconflict programming. This is an accessible and timely work that will be a useful introduction to another side of contemporary conflict.

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Public Debate in the Civil War Era
A Rhetorical History of the United States, Volume IV
David Zarefsky
Michigan State University Press, 2023
Public debate and discussion was overshadowed by the slavery controversy during the period of the U.S. Civil War. Slavery was attacked, defended, amplified, and mitigated. This happened in the halls of Congress, the courts, the political debate, the public platform, and the lecture hall. This volume examines the issues, speakers, and venues for this controversy between 1850 and 1877. It combines exploration of the broad contours of controversy with careful analysis of specific speakers and texts.
 
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A Southern Record
The History of the Third Regiment Louisiana Infantry
William Tunnard
University of Arkansas Press, 1997

Originally published in a limited edition in 1866, this memoir of Will Tunnard’s experiences and observations of the Civil War in the West, where he served in the famed Third Louisiana Infantry, is one of only a handful of chronicles left by western Confederate soldiers. His first-person account of the battles of Wilson’s Creek, Pea Ridge, Iuka, and Corinth as well as the seige of Vicksburg, is a vivid history of these hard-fought campaigns which determined the outcome of the war in the Trans-Mississippi theater.

Using letters and diaries assembled from former comrades as well as his own daily journal, Tunnard tells the story of his regiment and its extraordinary odyssey from the Gulf of Mexico to the Ozark Plateau and from the Indian Territory to Mobile Bay. He offers an extensive and valuable account of capture and parole at Vicksburg and includes muster rolls which will interest genealogists as well as Civil War scholars and history enthusiasts. With a clear eye for detail and an engaging, objective style, Tunnard conveys the pathos of war and recounts the trials of camp life, social conditions, and the war’s affect on the civilian population.

Noted Civil War scholar William L. Shea supports the original text with background on the regiment and the time period, sketching a helpful chronology of events. In retelling this remarkable story of comradeship, hardship, endurance, courage, pride, and eventual defeat, Tunnard and Shea give modern readers a rare glimpse of the war in the West.

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