Territorial Control in Civil Wars 

Abstract

Modern and historical conflicts are often defined by competition over territory. In civil wars, belligerent parties prioritize seizing land and natural resources, and influencing populations that reside within contested spaces. Because territorial control shapes critical conflict processes, it is a topic of paramount importance for scholars of conflict across social scientific disciplines and political science subfields. In this review article we survey five recent books that have reinvigorated the academic study of territorial control during civil wars. Each of the texts we review shares a common theme: how the fight to establish control shapes the course of war. We highlight the major theoretical and empirical contributions of the books we review, and synthesize their various contributions to theory and measurement. We characterize three generations of thinking about control in the extant literature, trace the evolution of thought across these waves, and underscore key theoretical and empirical developments of each generation. We argue the books we discuss represent an exciting, third wave of research on territorial control. To guide future work, we review the innovations of each advance in the study of territorial control, emphasizing the theoretical and empirical challenges that remain to be addressed.

Keywords: Territorial Control, Civil War, Conflict