Violence and Propaganda in European Civil Wars

Yiannis Kokosalakis is a guest researcher at Bielefeld University, Germany. He is the author of Building Socialism: The Communist Party and the Making of the Soviet System, 1921–1941 (2023).Francisco J. Leira‑Castiñeira is the Ramón y Cajal Fellow at Charles III University of Madrid, Spain. He is the author of Franco’s Soldiers: Recruitment and Combat in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) (2023) and co‑editor of The Crucible of Francoism (2021).

“Bringing together theoretical discussions of intrastate violence and empirical studies of conflicts in Russia, Finland, Ireland, Spain, Italy, and Greece, Propaganda and Violence offers a nuanced, multidisciplinary examination of the relationship between dehumanizing propaganda and the brutal realities of European civil wars. Contributors highlight both the utility of historical comparison and necessity of attending to the specific and varied personal, social, political, and ideological factors that generated violence in particular cases”.Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, West Chester University, USA“Why were Europe’s civil wars in the first half of the twentieth century often so violent? This important and ambitious volume analyses the ideological, political and social factors that generated these cultures of intense violence”.Martin Conway, University of Oxford, UK

• Foreword Introduction: Civil War in Word and Deed: Dimensions of violence in Europe’s Age of Civil Wars Part I: Contextual Aspects of Violence 1. Civil War as the Graveyard of Revolution in Europe, 1917-1923 2. “Civil War” in Modern France: A Historical Genealogy from Discursive Violence to Physical Killing 3. Was There a Balkan Civil War? 4. “Kill or Be Killed”: Psychological Approaches to Decision-Making and Moral Judgements in Wartime 5. Defining the Enemy: Propaganda in a Civil War 6. Brutality in Civil Wars: Sociological Reflections Part II: Political Discourse and Propaganda 7. ‘Corpulent plutocrats’ versus ‘scheming Jews’: Propaganda and Violence in the Russian Civil War 8. Enemy Images, Group Experiences and Propaganda in the Finnish Civil War, 1918 9. “There can be no compromise”: The Propaganda of the Irish Civil War 10. “The war of words”: Propaganda during the Spanish Civil War 11. Patriots, Traitors, and Rebels: Mutual Portraits of Partisans and Fascists in the Italian Civil War, 1943-1945 12. Political Discourse and Propaganda during the Greek Civil War Part III: Physical Violence 13. The Lynching of Naval Officers by Seamen: Myth and Reality of Violence during the Russian Revolution, 1917-1918 14. Citizens at War: Mobilization, Militarization, and Atrocities in the Finnish Civil War and Beyond 15. Violence in the Irish Civil War 16. “We Were Real Beasts”: From ‘Ordinary Men’ to Combatants in Spain, 1936-1939 17. The Italian Civil War: An Explosion of Brutality 18. The Logic of Violence during the Greek Civil War, 1946-1949