A civil war is a war between organized groups within the same nation state or rep ublic, or, less

commonly, between two countries created from a formerly-united n ation state. The aim of one side may be to take control of the country or a region, to achiev e independence for a region, or to change government policies. Civil wars since the end of World War II have lasted on average just over four y ears, a dramatic rise from the one-and-a-half year average of the 1900-1944 peri od. While the rate of emergence of new civil wars has been relatively steady sin ce the mid-19th century, the increasing length of those wars resulted in increas ing numbers of wars ongoing at any one time. For example, there were no more tha n five civil wars underway simultaneously in the first half of the 20th century, while over 20 concurrent civil wars were occurring at the end of the Cold War, before a significant decrease as conflicts strongly associated with the superpow er rivalry came to an end. Since 1945, civil wars have resulted in the deaths of over 25 million people, as well as the forced displacement of millions more. Ci vil wars have further resulted in economic collapse; Burma, Uganda and Angola ar e examples of nations that were considered to have promising futures before bein g engulfed in civil wars. Definition James Fearon, a scholar of civil wars at Stanford University, defines a civil wa r 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". The Correlates of War, a dataset widely used by scholars of conflict, classifies ci vil wars as having over 1000 war-related casualties per year of conflict. This r ate is a small fraction of the millions killed in the Second Sudanese Civil War and Cambodian Civil War, for example, but excludes several highly publicized con flicts, such as The Troubles of Northern Ireland and the struggle of the African National Congress in Apartheid-era South Africa. The party in revolt must be in possession of a part of the national territory. The insurgent civil authority must exercise de facto authority over the populati on within the determinate portion of the national territory. The insurgents must have some amount of recognition as a belligerent. The legal Government is "obliged to have recourse to the regular military forces against insurgents organized as military." Causes of civil war in the Collier-Hoeffler Model Scholars investigating the cause of civil war are attracted by two opposing theo ries, greed versus grievance. Roughly stated: are conflicts caused by who people are, whether that be defined in terms of ethnicity, religion or other social af filiation, or do conflicts begin because it is in the economic best interests of individuals and groups to start them? Scholarly analysis supports the conclusio n that economic and structural factors are more important than those of identity in predicting occurrences of civil war. A comprehensive studies of civil war was carried out by a team from the World Ba nk in the early 21st century. The study framework, which came to be called the C ollier-Hoeffler Model, examined 78 five-year increments when civil war occurred from 1960 to 1999, as well as 1,167 five-year increments of "no civil war" for c omparison, and subjected the data set to regression analysis to see the effect o f various factors. The factors that were shown to have a statistically-significa nt effect on the chance that a civil war would occur in any given five-year peri od were: Availability of finance A high proportion of primary commodities in national exports significantly incre ases the risk of a conflict. A country at "peak danger", with commodities compri sing 32% of gross domestic product, has a 22% risk of falling into civil war in a given five-year period, while a country with no primary commodity exports has a 1% risk. When disaggregated, only petroleum and non-petroleum groupings showed different results: a country with relatively low levels of dependence on petrol eum exports is at slightly less risk, while a high-level of dependence on oil as an export results in slightly more risk of a civil war than national dependence on another primary commodity. The authors of the study interpreted this as bein

g the result of the ease by which primary commodities may be extorted or capture d compared to other forms of wealth, for example, it is easy to capture and cont rol the output of a gold mine or oil field compared to a sector of garment manuf acturing or hospitality services. A second source of finance is national diasporas, which can fund rebellions and insurgencies from abroad. The study found that statistically switching the size of a country's diaspora from the smallest found in the study to the largest resu lted in a sixfold increase in the chance of a civil war. Population size The various factors contributing to the risk of civil war rise increase with pop ulation size. The risk of a civil war rises approximately proportionately with t he size of a country's population. Gleditsch et al. did not find a relationship between ethnic groups with polygyny and increased frequency of civil wars but na tions having legal polygamy may have more civil wars. They argued that misogyny is a better explanation than polygyny. They found that increased women's rights were are associated with less civil wars and that legal polygamy had no effect a fter women s rights were controlled for. Duration of civil wars Ann Hironaka, author of Neverending Wars, divides the modern history of civil wa rs into the pre-19th century, 19th century to early 20th century, and late 20th century. In 19th century Europe, the length of civil wars fell significantly, la rgely due to the nature of the conflicts as battles for the power center of the state, the strength of centralized governments, and the normally quick and decis ive intervention by other states to support the government. Following World War II the duration of civil wars grew past the norm of the pre-19th century, largel y due to weakness of the many postcolonial states and the intervention by major powers on both sides of conflict. The most obvious commonality to civil wars are that they occur in fragile states. Civil wars in the 19th and early 20th centuries Civil wars through the 19th century to early 20th century tended to be short; th e average length of a civil war between 1900 and 1944 was one and half years. Th e state itself was the obvious center of authority in the majority of cases, and the civil wars were thus fought for control of the state. This meant that whoev er had control of the capital and the military could normally crush resistance. If a rebellion failed to quickly seize the capital and control of the military f or itself, it was normally doomed to a quick destruction. For example, the fight ing associated with the 1871 Paris Commune occurred almost entirely in Paris, an d ended quickly once the military sided with the government. The power of non-state actors resulted in a lower value placed on sovereignty in the 18th and 19th centuries, which further reduced the number of civil wars. Fo r example, the pirates of the Barbary Coast were recognized as de facto states b ecause of their military power. The Barbary pirates thus had no need to rebel ag ainst the Ottoman Empire, who were their nominal state government, to gain recog nition for their sovereignty. Conversely, states such as Virginia and Massachuse tts in the United States of America did not have sovereign status, but had signi ficant political and economic independence coupled with weak federal control, re ducing the incentive to secede. The two major global ideologies, monarchism and democracy, led to several civil wars. However, a bi-polar world, divided between the two ideologies, did not dev elop, largely due the dominance of monarchists through most of the period. The m onarchists would thus normally intervene in other countries to stop democratic m ovements taking control and forming democratic governments, which were seen by m onarchists as being both dangerous and unpredictable. The Great Powers, defined in the 1815 Congress of Vienna as the United Kingdom, Habsburg Austria, Prussia, France, and Russia, would frequently coordinate interventions in other nations' civil wars, nearly always on the side of the incumbent government. Given the mi litary strength of the Great Powers, these interventions were nearly always deci sive and quickly ended the civil wars. There were several exceptions from the general rule of quick civil wars during t his period. The American Civil War was unusual for at least two reasons: it was

fought around regional identities, rather than political ideologies, and it was ended through a war of attrition, rather than over a decisive battle over contr ol of the capital, as was the norm. The Spanish Civil War was exceptional becau se both sides of the war received support from intervening great powers: Germany , Italy, and Portugal supported opposition leader Francisco Franco, while France and Russia supported the government . Civil wars since 1945 In the 1990s, about twenty civil wars were occurring concurrently during an aver age year, a rate about ten times the historical average since the 19th century. However, the rate of new civil wars had not increased appreciably; the drastic r ise in the number of ongoing wars after World War II was a result of the triplin g of the average duration of civil wars to over four years. This increase was a result of the increased number of states, the fragility of states formed after 1 945, the decline in interstate war, and the Cold War rivalry. Following World War II, the major European powers divested themselves of their c olonies at an increasing rate: the number of ex-colonial states jumped from abou t 30 to almost 120 after the war. The rate of state formation leveled off in the 1980s, at which point few colonies remained. More states also meant more states in which to have long civil wars. Hironaka statistically measures the impact of the increased number of ex-colonial states as increasing the post-WWII incidenc e of civil wars by +165% over the pre-1945 number. While the new ex-colonial states appeared to follow the blueprint of the idealiz ed state - centralized government, territory enclosed by defined borders, and ci tizenry with defined rights -, as well as accessories such as a national flag, a n anthem, a seat at the United Nations and an official economic policy, they wer e in actuality far weaker than the Western states they were modeled after. In We stern states, the structure of governments closely matched states' actual capabi lities, which had been arduously developed over centuries. The development of st rong administrative structures, in particular those related to extraction of tax es, is closely associated with the intense warfare between predatory European st ates in the 17th and 18th centuries, or in Charles Tilly's famous formulation: " War made the state and the state made war". For example, the formation of the mo dern states of Germany and Italy in the 19th century is closely associated with the wars of expansion and consolidation led by Prussia and Sardinia, respectivel y. Nevertheless, Western states that survived into the latter half of the 20th c entury were considered "strong" by simple reason that they had managed to develo p the institutional structures and military capability required to survive preda tion by their fellow states. In sharp contrast, decolonization was an entirely different process of state for mation. Most imperial powers had not foreseen a need to prepare their colonies f or independence; for example, Britain had given limited self-rule to India and S ri Lanka, while treating British Somaliland as little more than a trading post, while all major decisions for French colonies were made in Paris and Belgium pro hibited any self-government up until it suddenly granted independence to its col onies in 1960. Like Western states of previous centuries, the new ex-colonies la cked autonomous bureaucracies, which would make decisions based on the benefit t o society as a whole, rather than respond to corruption and nepotism to favor a particular interest group. In such a situation, factions manipulate the state to benefit themselves or, alternatively, state leaders use the bureaucracy to furt her their own self-interest. The lack of credible governance was compounded by t he fact that most colonies were economic loss-makers at independence, lacking bo th a productive economic base and a taxation system to effectively extract resou rces from economic activity. Among the rare states profitable at decolonization was India, to which scholars credibly argue that Uganda, Malaysia and Angola may be included. Neither did imperial powers make territorial integration a priorit y, and may have discouraged nascent nationalism as a danger to their rule. Many newly independent states thus found themselves impoverished, with minimal admini strative capacity in a fragmented society, while faced with the expectation of i mmediately meeting the demands of a modern state. Such states are considered "we ak" or "fragile". The "strong"-"weak" categorization is not the same as "Western

"-"non-Western", as some Latin American states like Argentina and Brazil and Mid dle Eastern states like Egypt and Israel are considered to have "strong" adminis trative structures and economic infrastructure. Historically, the international community would have targeted weak states for te rritorial absorption or colonial domination or, alternatively, such states would fragment into pieces small enough to be effectively administered and secured by a local power. However, international norms towards sovereignty changed in the wake of WWII in ways that support and maintain the existence of weak states. Wea k states are given de jure sovereignty equal to that of other states, even when they do not have de facto sovereignty or control of their own territory, includi ng the privileges of international diplomatic recognition and an equal vote in t he United Nations. Further, the international community offers development aid t o weak states, which helps maintain the facade of a functioning modern state by giving the appearance that the state is capable of fulfilling its implied respon sibilities of control and order. The formation of a strong international law reg ime and norms against territorial aggression is strongly associated with the dra matic drop in the number of interstate wars, though it has also been attributed to the effect of the Cold War or to the changing nature of economic development. Consequently, military aggression that results in territorial annexation became increasingly likely to prompt international condemnation, diplomatic censure, a reduction in international aid or the introduction of economic sanction, or, as in the case of 1990 invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, international military interven tion to reverse the territorial aggression. Similarly, the international communi ty has largely refused to recognize secessionist regions, while keeping some sta tes such as Cyprus and Taiwan in diplomatic recognition limbo. While there is no t a large body of academic work examining the relationship, Hironaka's statistic al study found a correlation that suggests that every major international anti-s ecessionist declaration increased the number of ongoing civil wars by +10%, or a total +114% from 1945-1997. The diplomatic and legal protection given by the in ternational community, as well as economic support to weak governments and disco uragement of secession, thus had the unintended effect of encouraging civil wars . There has been an enormous amount of international intervention in civil wars si nce 1945 that served to extend wars. While intervention has been practiced since the international system has existed, its nature changed substantially. It beca me common for both the state and opposition group to receive foreign support, al lowing wars to continue well past the point when domestic resources had been exh austed. Superpowers, such as the European great powers, had always felt no compu nction in intervening in civil wars that affected their interests, while distant regional powers such as the United States could declare the interventionist Mon roe Doctrine of 1821 for events in its Central American "backyard". However, the large population of weak states after 1945 allowed intervention by former colon ial powers, regional powers and neighboring states who themselves often had scar ce resources. On average, a civil war with interstate intervention was 300% long er than those without. When disaggregated, a civil war with intervention on only one side is 156% longer, while intervention on both sides lengthens the average civil war by an addition 92%. If one of the intervening states was a superpower , a civil war is extended a further 72%; a conflict such as the Angolan Civil Wa r, in which there is two-sided foreign intervention, including by a superpower, would be 538% longer on average than a civil war without any international inter vention. Effect of the Cold War The Cold War provided a global network of material and ideological support that perpetuated civil wars, which were mainly fought in weak ex-colonial states, ra ther than the relatively strong states that were aligned with the Warsaw Pact an d North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In some cases, superpowers would superimpo se Cold War ideology onto local conflicts, while in others local actors using Co ld War ideology would attract the attention of a superpower to obtain support. U sing a separate statistical evaluation than used above for interventions, civil wars that included pro- or anti-communist forces lasted 141% longer than the ave

rage non-Cold War conflict, while a Cold War civil war that attracted superpower intervention resulted in wars typically lasting over three times as long as oth er civil wars. Conversely, the end of the Cold War marked by the fall of the Ber lin Wall in 1989 resulted in a reduction in the duration of Cold War civil wars of 92% or, phrased another way, a roughly ten-fold increase in the rate of resol ution of Cold War civil wars. Lengthy Cold War-associated civil conflicts that g round to a halt include the wars of Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua . See also The Logic of Violence in Civil War War of Independence Wars of national liberation References Bibliography Ali, Taisier Mohamed Ahmed and Robert O. Matthews, eds. Civil Wars in Africa: ro ots and resolution, 322 pages Mats Berdal and David M. Malone, Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars . Paul Collier, Breaking the Conflict Trap: civil war and development policy World Bank - 320 pages Stathis Kalyvas, "'New' and 'Old' Civil Wars: A Valid Distinction?" World Politi cs 54, no. 1 : 99-118. David Lake and Donald Rothchild, eds. The International Spread of Ethnic Conflic t: Fear, Diffusion, and Escalation . Roy Licklider, "The Consequences of Negotiated Settlements in Civil Wars, 1945-1993," American Political Science Review 89, no. 3 : pp 681 690. Andrew Mack, "Civil War: Academic Research and the Policy Community," Journal of Peace Research 39, no. 5 : pp. 515 525. David T. Mason and Patrick 3. Fett, "How Civil Wars End: A Rational Choice Appro ach," Journal of Conflict Resolution 40, no. 4 : 546-568. Patrick M. Regan. Civil Wars and Foreign Powers: Outside Intervention in Intrast ate Conflict 172 pages Stephen John and others., eds. Ending Civil Wars: The Implementation of Peace Ag reements, 729 pages Monica Duffy Toft, The Geography of Ethnic Violence: Identity, Interests, and th e Indivisibility of Territory . ISBN 0-691-12383-7. Barbara F. Walter, Committing to Peace: The Successful Settlement of Civil Wars, Elisabeth Jean Wood; "Civil Wars: What We Don't Know," Global Governance, Vol. 9 , 2003 pp 247+ External links , BBC News, 20 April 2006 be-x-old:????????????? ????? fiu-vro:Kodosda zh-yue:?? bat-smg:Cevelene vaina Bibliography: Wikipedia @baygross