ABSTRACT
The security dilemma is one of the best known and most influential conjectures about how violence is initiated and escalates in the context of civil war. A concept imported to the study of civil wars from the realist analysis of interstate conflict by Barry Posen (1993), this insight has been used, modified, extended, or revised in several papers focusing on civil war onset and escalation (e.g. De Figueiredo and Weingast 1999; Saideman 1998; Hardin 1995). The Yugoslav civil wars are the main case used to illustrate the dynamics of the security dilemma.
