Civil Wars: What Is Wrong with History?

Abstract

Civil wars constitute an element without which the history of humanity is incomprehensible. Since 1917, they alone claimed some 20 million lives and displaced 67 million people, standing alone as the undisputed primary form of armed conflict worldwide since the end of the Second World War. Their definition is crucial to understand them and to place them within intrastate and transnational policies. However, in its definition, the historical dimension has been systematically undervalued. In this paper, we address both a history of the concept and the elements that, in our opinion, help defining civil wars in historical terms.