The Axis Occupation and Civil War: Changing Trends in Greek Historiography, 1941–2002

This article examines the literature on the Greek Civil War and evaluates the changing trends on the field. Based on over 1,800 entries, it reassesses and describes the qualitative characteristics of the literature, connecting the production with the political implications and conjunctions of the Cold War era, Greek politics and the post-Cold War period. Scholarly research has mainly examined the international and domestic level of political actions, mainly through a single point of view of political identities and Cold War categorizations. The post-Cold War period allowed research to focus on marginalized issues such as ethnic identities, gender, case studies and local histories. This new trend is based on a new set of conceptual and methodological tools (e.g. oral history, gender studies and electoral studies) and combines various disciplines far from dominant in the Greek 1940s scholarly literature (e.g. anthropology, political science, etc.). Although this trend is still in progress, it shows the biases as well as the complexity and ambiguity of the set of terms used previously. Finally, this new trend attempts with some success to incorporate into the Greek case the findings of the international academic discussion on civil wars and social movements.