Hard fighting has been going on in Sudan for just over two weeks between the regular army and a strong paramilitary group for control of power in the country: the clashes have caused an unknown number of deaths (hundreds only among civilians) and all efforts by the international community to organize a truce between the parties have been in fact useless.
The clashes in Sudan are still at an early stage, and it is not entirely clear how they should be defined: the fighting is high intensity, extended to a large part of the country and by now involving tens of thousands of people, between those engaged in the clashes and those forced to flee violence. At the same time, however, the media and experts are hesitant to define what is happening in Sudan as a “civil war”: both because it seems premature and because the term is given an extremely serious meaning. This case also shows how difficult it is to define with sufficient precision what a civil war is, and when internal conflicts in a country can or cannot be defined as such.
– Listen to Globe: Understand something of the clashes in Sudan, with Sara De Simone
Civil war is generally understood as an armed conflict in which two organized groups vie for power within a state. Usually the two groups are on one side the government de jure of the country, i.e. the legally recognized one, on the other a group of rioters, which however must have a certain level of military organization. Over the decades, however, various scholars have given slightly different definitions of “civil war” depending on the interpretations of the various elements taken into consideration.
One of the main reasons for this uncertainty is that international institutions such as the UN have never given a precise definition of civil war. The Geneva Convention, which defines the legal standards of law in war, speaks of «non-international armed conflicts», and describes them as conflicts «taking place on the territory of a High Contracting Party between its armed forces and dissident armed forces or organized armed groups which, under responsible command, exercise such control over a part of its territory as to enable them to carry out sustained and concerted military operations”.
An institution with a prestigious international status such as the International Red Cross, in a comment to the Third Geneva Convention, provides a more specific definition, according to which:
(1) the party in revolt against the government de jure possesses an organized military force, an authority responsible for its acts, acts within a specified territory and has the means to respect and enforce the Convention [di Ginevra].
(2) the legal government is obliged to have recourse to regular military forces against militarily organized insurgents who are in possession of part of the national territory.
The International Red Cross then provides for other clauses, in particular regarding the recognition of both parties as warring parties within a conflict.
These more or less official definitions show us that, when speaking of civil wars, the characteristics to consider are:
– who are the two parties to the conflict, which in most cases are one the incumbent government and the other an insurgent group;
– the way in which the two sides fight: they must have military organizations comparable to armies, and according to some definitions the fighting must reach a certain intensity before it can be considered “war”;
– the objective for which the two parties fight: control of power, control of the state or, in some more theoretical but effective definitions, the «monopoly of force», i.e. the possibility of being the only entity within a state capable of using instruments of coercion, and therefore of effectively exercising power (the definition of «monopoly of force» is by the famous German sociologist Max Weber).
These three characteristics help distinguish civil wars from other conflicts that may occur within a state. In revolutions, the goal of the insurgents is the conquest of power, but the insurgents do not organize themselves as an army (although it is true that revolutions are often followed by civil wars, as was the case after the Russian Revolution of 1918). Insurgencies differ in the organization of the insurgents and goals. The wars of secession, on the other hand, have a different objective: a region or a colony of a state fights for independence.
As is quite evident, all these definitions are empirical and rather fuzzy. They may apply clearly and clearly to some of the great civil wars of the past, such as the American Civil War and the Spanish Civil War, but for many other historical cases, even extremely well-known ones, the definitions are difficult to apply. For example, it is not clear how to define the “Northern Irish Troubles”, in which the British state clashed on one side and the Northern Irish independence activists of the IRA on the other: the clashes went on for thirty years between 1968 and 1998 and caused over 3,500 dead.
Even the confrontation in Sudan has many characteristics of civil war: two armies within a state which evidently face each other militarily to conquer the monopoly of force. Despite this, the media and experts still do not believe that the definition of civil war is adequate, even if according to some it risks being close.
For this reason, some scholars tend to add characteristics to make the definition of civil war even more specific: a very popular condition is that according to which a civil war, to be civil, must cause at least 1,000 deaths a year (another definition instead provides for a thousand deaths in all). In this way it would be possible to distinguish high-intensity warfare from more sporadic combat.
There are also many other elements to consider, for example international involvement. Many civil wars begin as internal clashes, but end up involving other countries as well: for example, an allied foreign government can enter the war in support of one of the two parties, “internationalizing” the conflict. For this reason some groups that study the characteristics of war, such as the Uppsala Conflict Data Program and the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo, distinguish between “internal wars” and “internationalized internal wars”.