What distinguishes a civil war from a revolution? My intuitive reaction to this question was to ask another one, why do we categorize these events separately? This question is far from rhetorical, as it is essentially the role of political scientists to describe an distinguish political objects from one another in a way that enhances our understanding of said objects, and more broadly, how their interactions form the world as we know it. The objective results of these phenomena, revolutions and civil wars, occur regardless of how we describe them, but I believe distinguishing them leads to meaningful insight into why each of them happen or are successful.

I think the largest and simplest difference between the two follows a consensus reached by at least some of the class in our discussion, that in some capacity revolutions carry with them genuine ideological motivation. This contrasts them from some civil wars in the sense that civil wars can be fought between two or more groups for control over the authority of region. It would be more accurate to say that these battles are fought between factions competing for resources and power as opposed to being fought between competing ideologies. Much thought has been put into the specific ideologies behind revolutions, and the success of a revolutionary effort has is often heavily ascribed to the intricacies the ideas that motivate it (for example, in the capacity of certain ideas to resonate with important demographics within a state’s population). This same analysis is less effective in understanding the success of civil wars that are probably better described in simple “realist” capacity terms.

It is worth noting that many civil wars fought by groups that do not end up resulting in a state’s radical ideological shift (as opposed to a figurative “musical chairs” of who is in power) are certainly self-characterized by the groups as a revolution during and after the conflict. This kind revolutionary framing, which we discussed often in terms of post-colonial Haiti, helps justify and encourage the actions of actors in combat as well as helps to create a more favorable dominant (or hidden) narrative. In assessing how an event should be categorized after it has occurred, I think it is important not to take the “revolutionary” factions narrative at face value, and assess the actual change that occurs after the group has taken power or even its genuine willingness to attempt such changes. In this framework, I think many successful civil wars result in ultimately failed revolutions.