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v t e

A civil war is a military conflict which arises from a desire for usually radical change in society as a result of either cultural, social, religious, political or economic disputes due to diametrically opposed and uncompromising ideas about the leadership, administration and management of the population and territory it occupies, and which is resolved through use of weapons. Civil wars generally result in higher casualties per country than other types of wars. The opponents are usually representatives of the same culture, society or nationality, and contest the right for the control of political power, and with it the right to formulate policy for future administration of the population and resources of the territory where the dispute takes place.

Civil wars may be preceded by a revolution when the major societal restructuring is attempted through a rapid and sudden effort to change the existing governing authority by force. A slow attempt to change the existing governing authority by force is called an insurgency, and whether successful or not, is likely to be classified as a civil war by some historians if, and only if, opposed by organized armed forces that seek to fight the insurgents using conventional tactics. Some historians define the civil war as a prolonged violence between organized factions or defined regions of a country, conventionally fought or not.

Historical examples

The successful civil war of the 1690s in England which led to the temporary overthrow of the monarchy represented by Charles I became known as the English Civil War, however it has also been described, by Marxists and some historians, as the English Revolution.

The unsuccessful insurgency of the 1860s by southern U.S. states against the federal government backed by Northern states, which also featured organized armies fighting battles, came to be known as the American Civil War. While hostilities were still ongoing, most Confederates preferred to call the conflict the Second American Revolution or something very similar. In the United States, and in American-dominated sources, this war is the default "Civil War," with other civil wars noted or inferred from context.

Scholarly Opinion

A civil war is "a violent conflict within a country fought by organized groups that aim to take power at the center or in a region, or to change government policies". Everyday usage of the term does not entail a clear threshold for how much violence is necessary to qualify a conflict as a civil war, as opposed to terrorism or low-level political strife. Scholars use two criteria: the warring groups must be from the same country and fighting for control of the political center, control over a separatist state or to force a major change in policy. A second criterion, used by some academics, is that at least 1,000 people must have been killed in total, with at least 100 from each side. The Correlates of War, a dataset widely used by scholars of conflict, classifies civil wars as having over 1000 war-related casualties per year of conflict. This rate is a small fraction of the millions killed in the Second Sudanese Civil War and Cambodian Civil War, for example, but excludes several highly publicized conflicts, such as The Troubles of Northern Ireland and the struggle of the African National Congress in Apartheid-era South Africa. Based on the 1000 casualties per year criterion, there were 213 civil wars from 1816 to 1997, 104 of which occurred from 1944 to 1997.

International Definition

The Final Record of the Diplomatic Conference of Geneva of 1949, (Volume II-B, p. 121) does not specifically define the term ‘civil war’. It did, however, describe the criteria that separate any act committed by force of arms (anarchy, terrorism, or plain banditry) from those qualifying as ‘armed conflict not of an international character’ which includes civil wars. Among those conditions listed are these four basic requirements.

• The party in revolt must be in possession of a part of the national territory.

• The insurgent civil authority must exercise de facto authority over the population within the determinate portion of the national territory.

• The insurgents must have some amount of recognition as a belligerent.

• The legal Government is “obliged to have recourse to the regular military forces against insurgents organized as military.”

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) further clarified Article 9 of the Geneva Convention. They stated that the nature of these armed conflicts, not of an international character “generally refer to conflicts with armed forces on either side which are in many respects similar to an international war, but take place within the confines of a single country.”

U.S. Military Definition

The U.S. military has adopted the principles set by the Diplomatic Conference of Geneva for their definition of civil war. However, it does include an additional requirement for identifiable armed forces. The December 1990 version of FM 100-20 (Military Operations in Low Intensity Conflict) defines a civil war as:

“A war between factions of the same country; there are five criteria for international recognition of this status: the contestants must control territory, have a functioning government, enjoy some foreign recognition, have identifiable regular armed forces, and engage in major military operations.”

NATO Definition

NATO does not directly define civil war. However, in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Glossary of Terms and Definitions (Organisation Du Traite De L'Atlantique Nord Glossaire De Terms Et Definitions) NATO does provide a reference for what is not classified as a civil war. The manual states that 'civil disturbance' is defined as "group acts of violence and disorder prejudicial to public law and order".

This definition supports the premise shared by the Geneva Convention, ICRC, and the U.S. Military that a civil war is a higher level of violence commensurate with that of a conventional war of movement.

Premodern civil wars

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Religious conflicts

Civil wars that are fought over religion have tended to occur more in monotheistic than in polytheistic societies; one explanation is that the latter tend to be more "flexible" in terms of dogma, allowing for some latitude in belief. In Europe through the Middle Ages, the Christianity of the great bulk of the population was influenced by pagan tradition. With the great majority of the population illiterate, access to the Bible was limited and led to a significant amount of syncretism between Christian and pagan elements. With religion so loosely applied, it was rare for people to feel particularly oppressed by it. There were periodic appearances of heresies, such as that of the Albigensians, which led to violence, but historians tend to view these to be the product of peasant revolts rather than themselves motivators of a civil war.

As religions tended to become more rigidly defined and understood by their followers, inter-religious tensions generally increased. The rise of Islam witnessed a rash of uprisings against non-Islamic rulers soon after its appearance. Subsequent Islamic history has been marked by repeated civil conflicts, mostly stemming out of the Shi'ite-Sunni divide. In Europe the Protestant Reformation had a similar effect, sparking years of both civil and international wars of religion. Civil wars between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism consumed France in the Wars of Religion, the Netherlands during the Eighty Years' War, Germany during the Thirty Years' War. Religious disputes among Protestant sects also played a role in the English Civil Wars, while official persecution of Catholics during the French Revolution spurred the Revolt in the Vendée. In China an attempt at religious revolution caused the bloodiest civil war of all time, the Taiping Rebellion. Another Chinese rebellion was the Boxer Rebellion. Ongoing examples as of 2008 include the Sri Lankan Civil War.

Revolutions

A revolution is generally seen as a civil war fought over issues of ideology, over how power should be organized and distributed, not merely over which individuals hold it. The classic example of a revolution, and by some arguments the first is the French Revolution, which is seen to have pitted the middle class and urban poor of France against the aristocracy and monarchy. Some argue that revolutions are a modern continuation of the peasant revolts of the past. Unlike peasant revolts, however, revolutions are almost always led by members of the educated, but disaffected, middle class who then rally the large mass of the population to their cause. Others see ideology as merely replacing religion as a justification and motivation for violence that is fundamentally caused by socio-economic factors. To be successful revolutions almost always require use of armed force and sometimes escalate to a civil war, such as in the Chinese Civil War. In some cases, such as the French and Russian Revolutions the revolutionaries succeed in gaining power through a quick coup or localized uprising, but a civil war results from counterrevolutionary forces organizing to crush the revolution as the strong Royalist support in the South American wars of independence.

Separatist revolts

One of the most common causes of civil wars, especially in the post-Cold War world has been separatist violence. Nationalism can be seen as similar to both a religion and an ideology as a justification for war rather than a root cause of conflict. All modern states attempt to hold a monopoly on internal military force. For separatist civil wars to break out thus either the national army must fracture along ethnic, religious, or national lines as happened in Yugoslavia; or more commonly a modern separatist conflict takes the form of asymmetrical warfare with separatists lightly armed and disorganized, but with the support of the local population such groups can be hard to defeat. This is the route taken by most liberation groups in colonies, as well as forces in areas such as Eritrea and Sri Lanka. Regional differences may be enhanced by differing economies, as in the American Civil War. National minorities are also often minorities and wars of religion may link closely into separatist conflicts.

Coups

Coups d'état, in Spanish golpes de estado, are by definition quick blows to the top of a government that do not result in the widespread violence of a civil war. On occasion a failed coup, or one that is only half successful, can precipitate a civil war between factions. These wars often quickly try to pull in larger themes of ideology, nationalism, or religion to try to win supporters among the general population for a conflict that in essence is an intra-elite competition for power.

Reasons for war

One of the most comprehensive studies of civil war was carried out by a team from the World Bank in the early 2000s. The study framework, which came to be called the Collier-Hoeffler Model, examined 78 five-year increments civil war from 1960 to 1999, as well as as well as 1167 five-year increments of "no civil war" for comparison, and subjected the data set to regression analysis to see the effect of various factors. The factors that were shown to have a statistically-significant effect on the chance that a civil war would occur in any given five-year period were:

Availability of finance

A high proportion of primary commodities in national exports significantly increases the risk of a conflict. A country at "peak danger", with commodities comprising 32% of gross domestic product, has a 22% of falling into civil war, while a country with no primary commodity exports has a 1% risk. When disaggregated, only petroleum and non-petroleum groupings showed different results: a country with relatively low levels of dependence on petroleum exports is at slightly less risk, while a high-level of dependence on oil as an export results in slightly more risk of a civil war than national dependence on another primary commodity. The authors of the study interpreted this as being the result of the ease by which primary commodities may be extorted or captured compared to other forms of wealth, e.g. it is easy to capture and control the output of a gold mine or oil field compared to a sector of garment manufacturing or hospitality services.

A second source of finance is national diasporas, which can fund rebellions and insurgencies from abroad. The study found that statistically switching the size of a country's diaspora from the smallest found in the study to the largest resulted in a sixfold increase in the chance of a civil war.

Opportunity cost of rebellion

Higher male secondary school enrollment, per capita income and economic growth rate all had significant effects on reducing the chance of civil war. Specifically, a male secondary school enrollment 10% above the average reduced the chance of a conflict by about 3%, while a growth rate 1% higher than the study average resulted in a decline in the chance of a civil war of about 1%. The study interpreted these three factors as proxies for earnings foregone by rebellion, and therefore that lower foregone earnings encourages rebellion. Phrased another way: young males (who make up the vast majority of combatants in civil wars) are less likely to join a rebellion if they are getting an education and/or have a comfortable salary, and can reasonably assume that they will prosper in the future.

Low per capita income has been proposed as a cause for grievance, prompting armed rebellion. However, for this to be true, one would expect economic inequality to also be a significant factor in rebellions, which it is not. The study therefore concluded that the economic model of opportunity cost better explained the findings.

Military advantage

High levels of population dispersion and, to a lesser extent, the presence of mountainous terrain increased the level of conflict. Both of these factors favor rebels, as a population dispersed outward toward the borders is harder to control than one concentrated in a central region, while mountains offer terrain where rebels can seek sanctuary.

Grievance

Most proxies for "grievance" - the theory that civil wars begin because of issues of identity, rather than economics - were statistically insignificant, including economic equality, political rights, ethnic polarization and religious fractionalization. Only ethnic dominance, the case where the largest ethnic group comprises a majority of the population, increased the risk of civil war. A country characterized by ethnic dominance has nearly twice the chance of a civil war. However, the effects of ethnic and religious fractionalization, i.e. the more chance that any two randomly chosen people will be from separate ethnic or religious groups the less chance of a civil war, were also significant and positive. The study interpreted this as stating that minority groups are more likely to rebel if they feel that they are being dominated, but that rebellions are more likely to occur the more homogeneous the population and thus more cohesive the rebels. These two factors may thus be seen as mitigating each other in many cases.

Population size

The various factors contributing to the risk of civil war rise increase with population size. The risk of a civil war rises approximately proportionately with the size of a country's population.

Time

The more time that has elapsed since the last civil war, the less likely it is that a conflict will recur. The study had two possible explanations for this: one opportunity-based and the other grievance-based. The elapsed time may represent the depreciation of whatever capital the rebellion was fought over, e.g. diamonds mines that are now exhausted, hardwood forests that have since been cut down or the destruction of an abundance of weapons facilitating armed conflict, and thus increase the opportunity cost of restarting the conflict. Alternatively, elapsed time may represent the gradual process of healing of old hatreds. The study found that the presence of diaspora substantially reduced the positive effect of time, as the funding from diasporas offsets the depreciation of rebellion-specific capital.

See also

• List of civil wars
• List of divided nations
• Wars of national liberation
• The Logic of Violence in Civil War

References

1. J. FEARSON, "Iraq's Civil War" in Foreign Affairs, March/April 2007,
2. Edward Wong, "A Matter of Definition: What Makes a Civil War, and Who Declares It So?" New York Times November 26, 2006 online at
3. Ann Hironaka, Neverending Wars: The International Community, Weak States, and the Perpetuation of Civil War, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass., 2005, p. 3, ISBN 0674015320
4. International Humanitarian Law - Third 1949 Geneva Convention
5. AAP-6(V), NATO GLOSSARY OF TERMS AND DEFINITIONS
6. ^ Collier, Paul, Anke Hoeffler and Nicholas Sambanis, "The Collier-Hoeffler Model of Civil War Onset and the Case Study Project Research Design," in Collier, Paul and Nicholas Sambanis, eds, Understanding Civil War, Volume 1: Africa, The World Bank, 2005, p. 17
7. ^ Collier, Hoeffler and Sambanis, 2005, p. 16
8. ^ Collier, Hoeffler and Sambanis, 2005, p. 18

Bibliography

• Ali, Taisier Mohamed Ahmed and Robert O. Matthews, eds. Civil Wars in Africa: roots and resolution (1999), 322 pages
• Mats Berdal and David M. Malone, Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars (Lynne Rienner, 2000).
• Paul Collier, Breaking the Conflict Trap: civil war and development policy World Bank (2003) - 320 pages
• Stathis Kalyvas, "'New' and 'Old' Civil Wars: A Valid Distinction?" World Politics 54, no. 1 (2001): 99-118.
• David Lake and Donald Rothchild, eds. The International Spread of Ethnic Conflict: Fear, Diffusion, and Escalation (Princeton University Press, 1996).
• Roy Licklider, "The Consequences of Negotiated Settlements in Civil Wars, 1945--1993," American Political Science Review 89, no. 3 (summer 1995): pp 681-690.
• Andrew Mack, "Civil War: Academic Research and the Policy Community," Journal of Peace Research 39, no. 5 (2002): pp. 515-525.
• David M. Malone and Mats R. Berdal. Greed and Grievance: economic agendas in civil wars (2000), 251 pages
• David T. Mason and Patrick 3. Fett, "How Civil Wars End: A Rational Choice Approach," Journal of Conflict Resolution 40, no. 4 (fall 1996): 546-568.
• Patrick M. Regan. Civil Wars and Foreign Powers: Outside Intervention in Intrastate Conflict (2000) 172 pages
• Stephen John et al, eds. Ending Civil Wars: The Implementation of Peace Agreements (2002), 729 pages
• Monica Duffy Toft, The Geography of Ethnic Violence: Identity, Interests, and the Indivisibility of Territory (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). ISBN 0-691-12383-7.
• Barbara F. Walter, Committing to Peace: The Successful Settlement of Civil Wars (Princeton University Press, 2002),
• Elisabeth Jean Wood; "Civil Wars: What We Don't Know," Global Governance, Vol. 9, 2003 pp 247+ online version

External links

• What makes a civil war?
• The Wars of the Roses Information about the English civil war fought between 1455 and 1487.
• Royal Air Force Doctrine - The Nature of War and Armed Conflict
• Secular Cycles and Millennial Trends

• Civil wars