munaeem | 30 November, 2006 20:31
There is also an academic approach to the issue which attempts to find an adequate and useful definition of the concept. This approach is about understanding the component elements of a given event before a fully adequate definition can be be applied for the purposes of understanding a subject, not for scoring political points.
The problem, like discussions of complex terms like terrorism and democracy, is that in the public discourse the political and the academic often are merged and mixed in a way that confuses the issue.
One reason this happens is that is it often difficult to adequately classify an event on the fly, as all facts are not almost immediately known to those seeking to study it.
As such, while political violence is not my primary area of expertise, it is at least a secondary one (it is rather difficult to study Colombia and political development in general and not study political violence). Indeed, while I ended up focusing primarily on the study of democracy, institutions and elections I started out my political science career looking at failed institutions and the commensurate political violence that such circumstances create (guerrilla activity, rebellions, revolutions).
Given all of this background let me note that I remain unready to term the situation in Iraq a civil war, and I say that wholly from my academic perspective. That the policy has failed is clear and it difficult to see what can be salvaged from it at this point, so my motivations in my conceptual choices is not motivated by any desire to provide cover to the Bush administration.
In this context we have the following from the NYT: A Matter of Definition: What Makes a Civil War, and Who Declares It So?.
In the piece we are offered the following definition:
The common scholarly definition has two main criteria. The first says that 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. The second says that at least 1,000 people must have been killed in total, with at least 100 from each side.
The degree to which this is “common” definition is questionable. Indeed, that strikes me as an overly expansive definition that would make a large number of internal conflicts civil wars.
The opposing definition in the piece is:
However, there are some dissenting historians on the definition of civil war, and whether it applies to Iraq. John Keegan, the British writer of war histories, finds only five clear-cut cases, starting with the English civil war of the 17th century through to the Lebanese war of the 20th century. His criteria are that the feuding groups must be vying for national authority, have leaders who publicly announce what they are fighting for and clash in set-piece battles while wearing uniforms, among other things. He argues in the December issue of Prospect magazine that Iraq is therefore not in civil war.
Keegan’s article can be found here: Opinions: ‘What is a civil war?’. The piece is worth reading and notes an issue that I think is missing at this point (and one I mentioned yesterday, although Keegan does a better job):
The third principal condition, authority, is just as important. The point of the violence must be sovereign rule: combatants must be trying either to seize national power or to maintain it. This is the difference between, for example, the Russian civil war and the tribal rebellions now taking place in 14 of India’s 28 states, or the late 1990s insurgency of Subcomandante Marcos in Mexico. Revenge, struggles for rights, mass criminality and positioning for economic gain are not sufficient, individually or severally. The opponents must be fighting to rule.
I think this gets to the heart of the matter. It is wholly unclear as to the a) the degree of organization of the sides and b) their exact goals at this point. Along these lines, Keegan notes:
Apart from attacks on the US-led coalition, the current violence in Iraq shows two signs of civil war: it is taking place within the national boundaries of a single country, and it primarily involves local people killing local people. It is civil, in other words. But is it war? And what about the question of authority?
For the record, here are Keegan’s examples of civil wars:
To pass the test of posterity and achieve historical status as a civil war is extremely rare. We can think of only five clear-cut cases: the English (1642-49), the American (1861-65), the Russian (1918-21), the Spanish (1936-39) and the Lebanese (1975-90). There are, of course, thousands of other violent internal struggles in history. But few are remembered as civil wars. Some of those that are so remembered have been misnamed, at least according to our criteria. (The Irish civil war is a borderline case and depends on the extent to which the free-staters are judged to have been running the state.)
Keegan’s whole piece is worth a read.
I would argue that the issue in Iraq is clouded by the fact that it is unclear if there is even a state in existence in Iraq at the moment and so this violence seems to me to be as much about the ability of violent groups to act with impunity in the absence of state control as it is about clear sides with clear goals vis-a-vis the state.
Ultimately the issue becomes whether one thinks that “civil war” simply means a certain level of violence or whether “civil war” means a certain type of violence.
Again, my point here is not to downplay the obvious and disturbing violence in Iraq at the moment, but rather to think about how it should be thought about, so to speak.
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