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Violence and Propaganda in European Civil Wars: Dimensions of Conflict, 1917–1949
Author(s): Yiannis Kokosalakis (Editor), Francisco J. Leira-Castiñeira (Editor)
- Publisher: Routledge
- Publication Date: 31 Mar. 2025
- Edition: 1st
- Language: English
- Print length: 334 pages
- ISBN-10: 1032307110
- ISBN-13: 9781032307114
Book Description
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.
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Review
“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
About the Author
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).
