At the end of the selection from Armitage’s piece on the Civil War in an Age of Revolutions, he writes that “when tracing the genealogy of modern revolutions, we should seriously consider the hypothesis that civil war was the genus of which revolution was only a species” (p. 158). This is an interesting assertion, for it posits that all revolutions are in fact civil wars, or rather wars between groups belonging to the same political entity, but which, even if not initially, seek to fundamentally change the distribution of power and to gain sovereignty for or over a particular group of people (rather than over a specified territory).

The key words, I believe, are sovereignty and people. Sovereignty is one of those weighty words in political science and international relations, but at its most basic is supreme authority, whether that is supreme authority within specified borders, for a particular group of people, or over one particular aspect of the state. In any event, sovereignty in whatever form is then inherently focused on changing the distribution of power, though in regards to what and how and for or over whom may remain unresolved questions even after the war. If this is so, then is revolution the act of struggling to attain sovereignty for or over a group of people? Or is it the actual fulfillment of sovereignty for or over a group of people, or does it encompass both?

Either way, the critical point is that revolutions are civil wars, but also that civil wars can become revolutionary. They become revolutionary through an assertion of sovereignty for or over a group of people that were once part of the same political entity as the other group(s). This analysis subsequently raises a host of further questions, such as what is the legal status of revolutionary civil wars? How and why does a group of people come to the collective determination of establishing sovereignty (however defined and envisioned)? Is sovereignty inviolable,or should it be? Why or why not? Does sovereignty provide civil war revolutionaries with a strategic, legal, or other advantage that would otherwise be unattainable if it were any other type of civil war? So, instead of asking why revolutions, perhaps the question should be why sovereignty?