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Conflict studies highlight the decline in relevance for resolving modern civil wars, indicating a disconnect between academia and real-world issues.
Ethiopia’s Tigray, Sudan, Gaza. In the 2020s, civil wars and counterinsurgencies have caused death and displacement on a scale not seen since the Cold War. Yet the academic field dedicated to studying such wars has never been less relevant to their resolution. Conflict studies is the child of a bygone era: a world in which Western scholars studied wars in faraway places, and Western states intervened in those same wars.
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Lacher et al. (2026) studied this question.
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