Distinguishing between civil wars and revolutions is tough because implicit in the question of how they differ is that they always differ. Danielle’s point in class that all “revolutions are civil wars but not all civil wars are revolutions” was incredibly poignant and encapsulated where I fall on the issue. If I accept the argument many of my peers are putting forward, that revolutions have an ideological underpinning, then certainly many civil wars constitute revolutions.
It is hard to divorce the belligerents in some of the most famous civil wars from their ideologies. How many times do we hear about how the American Civil War was a “battle for state’s rights,” “the abolition of slavery,” “to preserve the Union,” or any other statement that one might find in a textbook? Invariably, talking about the conflict forces us to understand the ideologies that created it in the first place. In the case of the United States, victory was achieved by the North whose actions and policies advocated for a significant departure from the way the government used to conceive of rights and their relationship to the state. Certainly, this would constitute a revolution (since government changed and an ideology was involved).
Besides ideas, civil wars can be fought over stuff too. Does this not make them revolutionary? Part of me thinks not since there is a desire for something is not explicitly linked to an ideology. But fighting for access to something or to prevent a group of people from getting something is inherently the product of an ideology that privileges a resource. If two factions fight over access to a water source (a civil war we may very much see in the future), then the logical extensions of the simplistic formulation of the belligerents’ positions are that some people deserve access to something and others do not. This sounds a lot like a boiled down version of any political justification for revolution.
Perhaps because of convention there should remain a basic distinction between the two, but for the purposes of an in depth examination, they seem ever more similar.
Oops. accidentally hit send. I’ll continue from my last sentence.
That a revolution cannot simply have any kind of ideology loosely behind it, but rather be genuinely driven by a universalizable ideology (for example marxism or republicanism) that can be applied outside of the specific interpersonal or intergroup relationships at hand. However, this definition likely excludes many instances that we would like to think of as revolutions. For example, its dubious whether or not a religiously fueled revolution would fall under this definition.
I definitely agree with the general line of argument you present, I think many people in our class have reached a similar point (certainly leaving room for nuance) that ideology is an important factor to consider when separating these two phenomena. You raise an excellent point in questioning how we can distinguish civil wars “fought over stuff” from revolutions when we can theoretically encapsulate the actions of the instigating group within some sort of ideology. To separate these two phenomena into their respective category, I feel pressured to qualify the requirements for a revolution. That a revolution cannot simply have any kind of ideology loosely behind it