■ Kalpakian, Jack, 2004. Identity, Conflict and Cooperation in International River Systems. Aldershot: Ashgate. vii + 213 pp. ISBN 0754633381
| DOI | 10.1177/00223433070440020706 |
| Author | Marit Brochmann |
| Published date | 01 March 2007 |
| Date | 01 March 2007 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
䊏Kalpakian, Jack, 2004. Identity, Conflict and
Cooperation in International River Systems.Aldershot:
Ashgate. vii + 213 pp. ISBN 0754633381.
‘Water disputes do not cause violent conflict’
(p. 193). This is the main conclusion in Kalpakian’s
book based upon case studies of three international
river basins: the Nile; the Tigris-Euphrates; and the
Indus. Starting from the assumption that conflicts
over water are not rational, he criticizes existing
theory for claiming this causal link. Through the
cases, he tries to illustrate that what matters as a
cause of conflict is identity. Identity shapes people’s
attitudes and creates ‘the others’. His cases are pre-
sented very thoroughly and offer an enormous
amount of information about the history of con-
flict and the current state of the hydrology in the
three basins. The book is a very interesting read,
but the conclusion that water disputes do not cause
conflicts is not well enough grounded on the basis
of these studies. Few scholars will claim that shared
waters cause serious violent conflicts, but rather
that they contribute to small-scale violence or the
prolonging or escalation of ongoing conflicts.
Kalpakian also admits to this, but states that other
political and cultural factors are more crucial.
These are not new findings. The book’s main con-
tribution, therefore, lies in the quality of the case
studies rather than adding to the theoretical devel-
opments within this field.
Marit Brochmann
䊏Kalyvas, Stathis N., 2006. The Logic of Violence
in Civil War. New York: Cambridge University
Press. xviii + 485 pp. ISBN 0521670047.
Kalyvas’s work currently serves as a bellwether for
scholars in conflict, war, and violence subfields.
This highly anticipated book will be widely read by
teachers, students, and scholars, not only for the
treasure trove of empirical information it offers or
for the provocative theory set forth, but also as a
guide for how future research in the field is likely to
develop. Kalyvas builds his theory from detailed
knowledge of several cases, which he then outlines
as a model with testable, falsifiable hypotheses con-
taining explicit predictions. He then proceeds to
marshal micro-level evidence of the Greek Civil
War with which to test his theory, using both quan-
titative and qualitative methodologies. At issue are
important questions surrounding the logic of killing
and violence in war. He argues that local actors and
center-based political elites ally to jointly produce
violence, often targeting intimates or peers. Identities
and preferences are endogenous to the conflict as
central actors try ‘to absorb local cleavages into the
master cleavage’ (p. 385). Denunciations and the
violence that follows occur most often when levels
of control are incomplete. Distinguishing between
both zones of control and levels of discrimination
in violence as Kalyvas does is only possible when
one has such rich micro-level data available. We
should all heed the call to disaggregate studies of
civil war insofar as they help reveal new questions,
generate fine-grained, local-level data with which to
perform theoretical tests, and assist our under-
standing of conflict processes and dynamics. The
Logic of Violence in Civil War exceeds expectations
and has been well worth the wait.
Jennifer Ziemke
䊏Kastfelt, Niels, ed., 2005. Religion and
African Civil Wars. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
x + 288 pp. ISBN 140396890X.
This edited volume explores the part played by
religion in recent African civil wars. The authors
focus on some key cases of conflict on the conti-
nent from Sudan to Rwanda, South Africa and
Sierra Leone. The starting point is that the authors
find that several recent conflicts have religious
dimensions that are of sufficient importance to be
studied in their own right without, importantly,
ignoring their social, economic and political
context. The authors discuss the role of religion in
terms of the role of religious institutions in con-
flicts, the use of religious symbols, ideas and rituals
in the actual fighting and justification of conflicts,
and also the ways in which wars have brought
about important religious changes. The intro-
ductory chapter by the editor presents a good
overview of the book and the theoretical and con-
ceptual underpinnings of the research field as it
has developed over time. The book as a whole is
interesting reading and presents some important
insights that have not received much attention
compared with other factors in recent conflict situ-
ations in Africa. In this sense, the book gives some
alternative outlooks for scholars within quantita-
tive and economics-inspired research on African
conflict. One consideration that is not perhaps
addressed as much as should be is a weighting of
the significance of religion versus other factors in
these conflicts – how strong is the religious
element, and to what extent is the religious factor
critical? This aside, I enjoyed reading the book,
BOOK NOTES 249
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