As this introductory chapter demonstrates, most armed conflicts since World War II have been intrastate conflicts, many of them conflicts that recurred. The book analyzes civil wars in which at least 1000 people lost their lives due to battles or deliberate attacks on civilians. It studies civil war recidivism, focusing on factors that can be shaped by decision-makers, primarily on the type of civil war termination and the post–civil war order, which is characterized by the distribution of military power between the former warring parties and the scale of political compromise.