David Alegre – författare

If there is a moment in which universal history passes through Spain, it is the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39. Similarly, twentieth-century European history is incomprehensible without the Spanish war. This handbook represents an ambitious, detailed and up-to-date perspective of the conflict.The Spanish war was not merely a civil war, but a transnational, global one. The seizure of power by fascism through war, the use of violence against civilians for the purpose of purging society, the establishment of concentration camps, and the overlap between the war of occupation and irregular warfare would all turn Spain into a sounding board and a testing ground for processes that would later spread across the continent. Bringing together both established scholars and many younger researchers, the chapters of this book address topics such as the militarisation, internationalisation and radicalisation of the conflict, the home front, issues of identity, exile, healthcare, the landscape and environment, and necropolitics.The Routledge Handbook of the Spanish Civil War will be an excellent university textbook for undergraduate and graduate students alike, as well as a basic reference for researchers of Spanish Civil War and the field of war studies more broadly.

Civil war was the most extreme, cruel and widespread form of violence during much of the 20th century. Its hurricane-like vortex devastated countries, split nations and destroyed communities in Europe, Asia, Africa and America. No other tool worked better for unleashing revolutions or repelling them, building nations, expelling ethnic or political minorities, securing territorial domains and economic resources, annihilating internal enemies, creating orphans and widows and generating human suffering. With the era of major international conflicts ending in the middle of the 20th century, civil wars are now the most recurrent type of armed conflict in the world. With more than 20 million victims and 65 million refugees since 1945, it is difficult to dispute their primacy in the hierarchy of contemporary terror.Civil Wars traces the history of civil wars in the 20th and 21st centuries, arguing that civil wars have played a key role in shaping the world in which we live today. It analyses a multitude of civil wars in different countries and regions of the world including Russia, Finland, Ireland, Spain, Italy, China, Yugoslavia, Greece, Korea, Indochina, Guatemala, Congo, Rwanda, Sudan, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Iraq and Syria. Through these case studies, the authors seek to identify elements intrinsic to civil war, such as its transnational nature, the contagion effect, recurrent conflict and extreme violence against civilians, in order to identify the cycles of civil war that shaped the twentieth century and continue to shape the world today.This book is the first to offer a global history of civil wars in the hundred years from 1917 to 2017: the century of terror and genocide, but also the century of civil wars. It will be of interest to a wide readership interested in war and conflict in the modern world, as well as to students and scholars of war and of modern history.