The Demise of Conflict Studies

[marmar]

The Demise of Conflict Studies
An entire industry specializing in mediation, peacekeeping, disarmament, and transitional justice has become largely obsolete.

Wolfram Lacher and Yvan Guichaoua ▪ Winter 2026


(Dissent) Ethiopia’s Tigray, Sudan, Gaza. In the 2020s, civil wars and counterinsurgencies have caused death and displacement on a scale not seen since the Cold War. Yet the academic field dedicated to studying such wars has never been less relevant to their resolution. Conflict studies is the child of a bygone era: a world in which Western scholars studied wars in faraway places, and Western states intervened in those same wars.

Just how closely the study of violent conflict was linked to the unique international moment that gave rise to it has only become clear since that moment passed. In a world where the UN rarely brokers settlements and Western states’ role in enforcing them is reduced to the Trump administration’s performative antics, who needs to understand how civil wars end or how armed groups behave? An entire industry specializing in mediation, peacekeeping, disarmament, or transitional justice has become largely obsolete. As the sway of Western armies and international organizations has diminished across war zones worldwide, researchers have found that their ground access is increasingly restricted, and the demand for their output is drastically receding.

But the crisis of conflict studies runs deeper. For three decades, its proponents generally assumed that Western governments were actors with the power to effect change for the better—at times misguided, but fundamentally well-intentioned. Brutal counterterrorism interventions, indifference to mass atrocities in Syria and Yemen, and hardening asylum policies gradually eroded this minimal consensus. Then came Gaza: an unprecedented shock to scholars’ widespread belief that policymakers shared their values. Worse, instead of speaking out as other disciplines did, the field morally collapsed from within, by remaining overwhelmingly silent in the face of Western-backed mass killing in Gaza. What, then, was conflict studies for? And what can its travails tell us about how wars have changed?

Conflict studies in its current form—a field exploring the drivers and the outcomes of civil wars and political violence by drawing, often comparatively, on country-level analysis—was born in the 1990s. During the Cold War, insurgencies had been studied by sociologists of revolutions and by theorists of social movements and anticolonial struggles. But mainstream political science and security studies were preoccupied with competition between superpowers and the threat of nuclear war. Civil wars were a marginal topic. With the end of the Cold War, studies of civil wars suddenly proliferated, receiving growing attention from Western publics. The prevalent sentiment was that “much of the underdeveloped world” was witnessing “the withering away of central governments, the rise of tribal and regional domains, the unchecked spread of disease, and the growing pervasiveness of war,” as the pundit Robert D. Kaplan put it in 1994. The following year, a group of Western politicians, humanitarians, and think tankers alarmed by “an explosion in the number of crises in the world” created the International Crisis Group, seeking to harness research to prevent conflict across the globe. .............(more)

https://dissentmagazine.org/article/the-demise-of-conflict-studies/