Mac Ginty (2011:2): Criticises prevailing tendency for studies of conflict to: (1) be overly neat, consisting of linear timelines, clear issues, and clear and homogeneous actors; (2) to be static; and (3) to be top-down and focus on governments and armed governments.
Mac Ginty (2011:2-3): Identifies two further trends in the study of peace and conflict: (1) to treat liberal peace as excessively coherent and powerful; and (2) “the romanticisation of local, indigenous, customary, and traditional approaches to peacebuilding and development.”
Mundy (2015:7): Derides what he describes as “new scientific and managerial frameworks of late warfare” that have emerged in the post-Cold War approach to understanding conflict.
Mundy (2015:9): Also identifies an “antipolitics of contemporary conflict science and management.” “Civil war, terrorism, and genocide, particularly in their most recent formulations, have been increasingly theorized and studied in depoliticised ways that flatten late warfare’s historical, geographical, and ideational contours.”
Mundy (2015:13): Both state and substate actors stripped of agency. Role of repression ignored, potential for state actors to choose conflict likewise, rebel groups relegated to criminal status in search of profit.
Mundy (2015:45): “Not only are the civil wars of today robbed of their politics by the illusion of internationality, but the actual politics of their causes and evolving violence are negated and supplemented as well.” The use of the label civil war negates international intervention and removes geopolitics from consideration.
Mundy (2015:50): Criticises neoclassical economic approaches where “a particular vision of how humans ought to behave has become a widely accepted scientific assumption about actual human psychology.”
Autesserre (2021:73): “my colleagues and I proudly viewed our work as a highly professional endeavor for which experts were needed. From this perspective, war and poverty are universal issues, rooted in human nature, which is the same everywhere. They are technical problems, too, which can be solved using technocratic solutions based on best practices and a large body of universal, time-tested ideas.”
Looking beyond physical violence