Order informs an actor’s context, studying order and accounting for the rules and relationships underpinning that order can tell us a great deal about how power and authority is constructed, renegotiated and contested. Order represents a promising prism and field of study for understanding civil wars. This article begins by assessing the ‘order turn’ in the literature over the past decade. From this basis we identify four key areas that represent important elements within the new ordering agenda that promise to add significantly to the study of order within the discipline. These include: 1) Mapping order(s) to better account for their complexity, especially by disaggregating internal orders within institutions and organisations; 2) Recognising civilians as individual and collective agents, moving beyond the civilians-as-victims paradigm to demonstrate how civilian action shapes order, forcing both rebel groups and governments to adapt; 3) Exploring the social mechanisms that reinforce order, thus moving the discussion beyond violence and political orders and towards a more holistic perspective; 4) Understanding that all orders are mutually constituted and thus understanding not only how order is expressed or acted upon but also how order is understood, how assumptions about order influence action, and crucially, how each group’s actions are shaped by the generation of knowledge about the order they inhabit. Using these we highlight both the promise of the concept of order for the study of civil wars and attempt to begin the development of a coherent research agenda to unify existing insights and lay the foundations for further advances.
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)