During this talk, Dr Scott Strauss, Associate Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison, will discuss his recent work on a comparative study of different trajectories of violence in civil war. Why do some armed conflicts produce large-scale violence against civilians, in particular genocide, while other armed conflicts produce much lower levels of violence against civilians? The main research objective is to develop a more nuanced theory of the dynamics of genocidal violence. The study focuses empirically on relatively recent (during the past two decades) armed conflicts in Rwanda, Sudan, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Chad, and Senegal; the theoretical perspective builds on existing national-level explanations of genocide and mass killing.