“Civil war” can be invoked to bring a conflict within the constraints of the Geneva Convention and to authorise intervention, including millions of dollars in humanitarian aid.
But an abundance of cases has not improved clarity. Only 5% of wars in the recent period have been between states. Intrastate war has replaced wars between states as the most common form of organised violence: the annual average of intrastate wars between 18 was a tenth of the number in each year since 1989. Civil war, writes David Armitage, a historian at Harvard University, is “an essentially contested concept about the essential elements of contestation”.
