Insurgency vs. Civil War

[Dayuhan]

James Fearon, a scholar of civil wars at Stanford University, defines a civil war as "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".Ann Hironaka further specifies that one side of a civil war is the state.

If one side of a civil war must be the state, that would exclude a case like Somalia, where there is no state. Seems an unnecessary qualification to me.

The intensity at which a civil disturbance becomes a civil war is contested by academics. Some political scientists define a civil war as having more than 1000 casualties, while others further specify that at least 100 must come 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.

A numerical cutoff offers precision, and some absurd possibilities as well. If the cutoff is 1000/year, that means a conflict could easily be a civil war one year, an insurgency the next, then a civil war again... which makes the distinction less than useful.

I have a bit of trouble defining a combined arms force of over 200K as an insurgent one. I think you fall into the trap of defining insurgency as anything Mao described. The Maoist approach was to use insurgency to prepare for conventional war.

I'll stick to my point that insurgency is a strategy, and a given protagonist may shift in and out of it. I think we befuddle ourselves when we try and define insurgency by its political objectives. We just can't transcend our obsession with the Cold War security environment.

By that standard it seems that irregular warfare by internal forces opposed to the state is insurgency, while regular warfare by internal forces opposed to the state is civil war. That of course requires some fixed line defining irregular vs regular warfare.

Is irregular warfare the strategy, or insurgency... or are they the same thing?

Is the difference between civil war and insurgency purely quantitative, a civil war simply being a large insurgency? Or is there a qualitative difference as well?

Given current circumstances, a more relevant question might be how much foreign participation is required for a conflict to be inter-state, rather than civil war or insurgency. Are both civil war and insurgency by definition purely internal?

At a certain level the distinctions become semantic, and certainly there's going to be some overlap. At the same time, though, it's useful to have some consensus on what these terms mean.