Understanding the causes of intrastate armed conflict and civil wars – whether as individual cases or in a more general sense – is the most compelling but perhaps also the most elusive challenge in the study of such conflicts. In this field, causal relationships are complex and difficult to establish beyond doubt, and discrete direct causes rarely exist. This chapter explores the methodological challenges that arise when seeking to identify direct or indirect causes of civil wars, in particular across multiple cases. It presents key theories of civil war onset in relation to political, economic, social, institutional, ecological, identity, and governance conditions. It gives particular attention to “greed” and “grievance” as key concepts for understanding why intrastate armed conflicts occur, the association between democratization and increased risk of violent conflict, and the concept of “ethnic conflict” as a cause of civil war. The question of whether it is more helpful to focus on enabling factors – the conditions that allow violent uprisings to occur – or motivations for participating in armed conflict to understand the causes of civil war is also discussed. The chapter concludes by considering the implications these debates raise for policies designed to prevent violent conflict and build sustainable peace.

This chapter examines the formidable challenges that remain in transparency research, not least due to the rapid evolution of technology. This chapter highlights four areas of challenges: methodological challenges that call for new methods for transparency research; open research questions related to existing systems; research questions related to new and emerging systems such as the internet of things; and challenges related to systems that are pervasively embedded into real-world systems and infrastructure, such as smart cites.