ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the contributions that anthropology might make to unravelling the causal mechanisms of civil war. It will not attempt a comprehensive review of the anthropological literature on civil wars but instead limits itself to three tasks: a discussion of the ways in which anthropologists approach key terms (civil war, ethnicity, religion); a commentary on the methods anthropology brings to the inter-disciplinary table (namely the so-called ethnographic approach); and a case study intended to illustrate how quantitative and qualitative approaches to social phenomena might be linked in the analysis of the socio-economic causes of civil wars.
