There is something rather magical in the idea of a 'safe zone' - almost as if by declaring an area to be safe one can make it so. Yet it would be more accurate to suggest that 'safe zones' are extremely fragile and depend for their existence on the complex and shifting goals of in-country actors...

Current scholarship on civil wars and transitions from war to peace has made significant progress in understanding the political dimensions of internal conflict, but the economic motivations spurring political violence have been comparatively neglected. This pathbreaking volume identifies the...