Free War From the Ground Up by Emile Simpson Page B

within two polarised constituencies, typically the state parties to a conflict.
    Where force is used within a fragmented political environment, it creates new enemies, who are not necessarily linked to any state. The essential feature of such an environment is that violence is not bound within the bilateral, polarised conception of two states at war; it has unpredictable, and often tragic, political outputs. The sectarian violence following the break-up of Yugoslavia, and in Iraq, occurred between communities who had previously co-existed, but were torn apart by the reciprocal hatred which violence causes.
    This dynamic would appear to run in parallel with what Stathis N. Kalyvas has so persuasively argued in
The Logic of Violence in Civil War
(2006). 25 He posits that the mainstream narratives of most civilwars tend to locate violence in terms of macro-level emotions, ideologies or cultures. However, the empirical evidence points to a far more complex and fragmented analysis. What can be incorrectly labelled as ‘madness’ (i.e. complex, fragmented and irregular patterns of violence) actually has logic, but this is often to be found at the micro, not the macro level: ‘because of the domination of national-level cleavages, grassroots dynamics are often perceived merely as their local manifestations. Likewise, local actors are only seen as local replicas of central actors’. 26 Violence at the local level is often produced by actors trying to avoid the worst and taking opportunities:
    For many people who are not naturally bloodthirsty and abhor direct involvement in violence, civil war offers irresistible opportunities to harm everyday enemies… Rather than just politicizing private life, civil war works the other way around as well: it privatises politics. Civil War often transforms local and personal grievances into lethal violence; once it occurs, this violence becomes endowed with a political meaning that may be quickly naturalised into new and enduring identities. Typically, the trivial origins of these new identities are lost in the fog of memory or reconstructed according to the new politics fostered by the war. 27
    Kalyvas argues that agency in the violence of civil wars is partly a function of ‘alliance’ between the centre and the periphery in that both use the other to their advantage. This allows for multiple, not unitary actors. He recognises that ‘master-narratives’ can legitimately identify the ‘master-cleavage’ in a civil war, but it is usually accorded too much significance post-conflict in the desire to ‘simplify, streamline, and ultimately erase the war’s complexities, contradiction and ambiguities’. Hence:
    Actions in civil war, including ‘political violence’, are not necessarily political, and do not always reflect deep ideological polarisation … an approach positing unitary actors, inferring the dynamics of identity and action exclusively from the master-cleavage, and framing civil wars in binary terms is misleading… Civil war fosters a process of interaction between actors with distinct identities and interests. It is the convergence between local motives and supralocal that endows civil war with its intimate character and leads to joint violence that straddles the divide between the political and the private, the collective and the individual. 28
    When the interpretive framework of Clausewitzian war is dragged into a situation which is closer to being a direct extension of policy through ‘armed politics’, be it in civil war as analysed by Kalyvas, or inthe current politically kaleidoscopic Afghan conflict, serious strategic confusion can occur. The key difference being that the interpretive framework of war in the Clausewitzian tradition presupposes a bilateral polarity which channels violence and a stability of association between strategic audiences and their state. Thus violence may well escalate