POLS1005 Lecture Notes - Failed State, Counter-Terrorism
21 May 2018
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[Lecture 6]
VIOLENCE BY NON-STATE ACTORS: Civil War and Terrorism
CIVIL WAR
• Definition – “armed combat taking place within the boundaries of a recognized sovereign
entity between parties subject to a common authority at the outset of the hostilities” (Kalyvas
2007: 417)
• Key features:
- Militarisation of a conflict
- Domestic challenge of authority
- Conflict rises above a death threshold
Similarities between interstate and intrastate war
• There is a basic similarity – the use of violence by organized actors to pursue political
interests
• External actors often play important roles over a civil conflict’s lifespan – civil wars can be a
forum for interstate conflict
The changing nature of war
• An overall decline in national identity as a motivation for conflict
• 19th C – wars were often about state-building
• 20th C – wars were often about ideology
• 21st C – wars are (so far) often about state failure
Why should we care?
• Between 1945 and 1999
- Interstate wars led to 3 million casualties
- Civil wars led to more than 16 million casualties
• Of the 69 peacekeeping operations undertaken by the UN between 1948 and 2014:
- 39 were deployed to conflicts within a single state
- 12 dealt with conflicts involving both international and civil dimensions
Civil conflicts by the numbers
• 143,883 – the average number of deaths per civil war
• 22 of 32 - The number of least developed states that have had a civil war in the last twenty
years
State failure
• Failed state - “a state that is unable to perform its key role of ensuring domestic order by
monopolizing the use of force within its territory’
• Thus a state can be considered as failing or failed if it is unable to hold up its end of the social
contract
• The spike in failures after the Cold War often attributed to both:
- The withdrawal of international support for autocratic governments
- A pressure to democratize domestic political institutions
Civil War
• Civil wars raise hard questions about (1) the limits of sovereignty and (2) definitions of
national security
• Different motivations lead to different policy responses:
- Economic aid (carrot)
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