Quote Originally Posted by John T. Fishel View Post
ll civil wars are insurgencies if by insurgency we mean an effort to overturn a govt and replace it with another by armed means.
I would largely agree (although I would probably count RSA as a civil war), in general civil wars are a subset of insurgencies. A few defining features:

1) Severity. We don't consider the Red Army Faction versus West Germany a civil war. (I'm sometimes tempted to define civil war as an insurgency that reaches the point that the government thinks "holy crap, we could lose this!")

2) Internal actors (although they may have external patrons). Violence wholly directed at an occupying power would not be a civil war.

3) Insurgency targets an established authority. In those rare cases where there is no authority--Somalia at certain times--you could have the unusual case of a civil war that isn't an insurgency.

Wilf raises an essential social science point, though. Categories are abstractions, and it's only worth defining and using them if by so doing we gain some greater analytical insight.