The Non-Internecine Aspects of Civil War, Essay Example

As the November 9, 2013 piece from The Economist, “How to stop the fighting, sometimes” notes, within political science civil wars have not been extensively theorized historically. The reason for this neglect, according to the article, is an emphasis on inter-state conflict between major state actors. However, this itself seems to be an omission in political science, grounded in a presupposition that civil war is only an internecine type of conflict. Rather, history demonstrates that civil wars are often forms of proxy wars, whereby the internecine conflict involves other foreign actors through various means, such as logistics, materials and ideological support. Hence, throughout the twentieth century, the two world superpowers of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., as The Economist text points out, were constantly involved in such proxy conflicts.

The current civil war in Syria repeats this same motif. The funding of Salafi militants by parties such as Kuwaiti Sheikhs, as chronicled in The New York Times article “Private Donors’ Funds Add Wild Card to War in Syria” demonstrates that in the contemporary era civil wars are not conflicts entirely internal to a state. Furthermore, such proxy wars are not even necessarily instigated by external states, as the article indicates, in so far as donors to the opposition to al-Assad are from the private sector.

Accordingly, this suggests that the understanding of civil war from the perspective of political science must develop a complicated etiology, whereby the effects and causes of civil wars are re-defined in terms of inter-state and even exo-state private actors. To a certain extent this is a radical theoretical move, since it challenges the very validity of the concept of civil war: purely internecine conflicts are almost non-existent in the present era. If civil wars mark a certain collapse of a particular state, since there is a struggle for power within this state, civil war theory does not lack a notion of state because of these same exterior actors. In short, civil wars are not an exception to inter-state relations, but rather a continuation of these relations in an anomalous form. The question about how to develop the anomalous form of civil war becomes a compelling theoretical question for political science.

Works Cited

Author Unknown. “How to stop fighting, sometimes.” The Economist, November 9, 2013. Retrieved 19 November 2013 at: http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21589431-bringing-end-conflicts-within-states-vexatious-history-provides-guide

Hubbard, Ben. “Private Donors’ Funds Add Wild Card to War in Syria.” The New York Times, November 12, 2013. Retrieved 19 November 2013 at: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/13/world/middleeast/private-donors-funds-add-wild-card-to-war-in-syria.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0