are all civil wars destined to repeat the massacres that hit our imagination? Do they necessarily result in the repetition of genocide against populations, the suffering of Biafra in Sudan? Are the barrels of explosives and gas attacks launched by the government in Syria only the local forms of massacres in Bosnia in the 1990s? We would be tempted to answer in the affirmative, but are we aware of the dynamics that explain why some social conflicts are turning into a civil war? These issues are being explored by two opposing books, both in their writing and in the theoretical approaches and methods they employ. Against each other, these two books show us the need for a conceptual reflection on what civil wars are, beyond approaches to international relations or quantitative analyses which do not take account of the complexity of the phenomena studied or which ignore analyses of societies.