The Logic of Violence in Civil War is a book which challenges the conventional view of violence in civil wars as irrational. The book presents a theory for levels of violence, as well as why selective violence (targeting individuals) and indiscriminate violence (targeting collectives) are at varying times employed in civil wars. He argues that higher levels of violence happen in territory under near-hegemonic rule (one group has overwhelming but incomplete dominance), as opposed to completely fragmented territory (no group has control) or fully controlled territory. He argues that violence will tend towards being indiscriminate in territory under fragmented control but be selective in territory under near-hegemonic control. The book offers a methodologically individualist account of civil wars that focuses on instrumental action by rational individuals. The book therefore focuses on the micro foundations of war, rather on the macro aspects of civil war that are dominant in the political violence literature. The author, Stathis N. Kalyvas (born 1964), is a political scientist known for his analysis of the dynamics of polarization and civil war, ethnic and non-ethnic violence, and the formation of cleavages and identities. He has also researched party politics and political institutions in Europe. He is a professor at the University of Oxford. In 2020, Scott Straus described the book as "one of the most influential in the field" of political violence. Background According to Kalyvas, he struggled to convince political scientists that micro-level violence was a topic worthy of study in political science prior to the publication of the book, as the focus in the existing political science literature on violence was overwhelmingly on collective uses of violence. His early papers were rejected by political science journals. Contents The logic behind violence in civil wars Since at least the French revolution, we have collected a frightening register of extremely violent events in the context of civil wars, and such apparent massive irrational behaviour among combatants and civilians (a sort of unexpected Hobbesian disease) has been widely examined by the literature. Previous works tried to insert violence as a phenomenon directly derived from the (military) logic of civil war using anecdotal accounts or cleavage-based analyses, but overlooked the fact that several manifestations of violence can be exogenous to that logic. Civil war can be an exogenous shock onto some societies that can activate invisible networks of grievances and feuds among their individuals. Kalyvas' book is focused on