Civil War

Armed conflict between organised groups within one state, with rebels controlling territory; the dominant form of war since 1945 and a large share of battle deaths since 1816.

Details

Civil war (COW "intra-state war") requires sustained combat between a government and organised rebels; COW threshold is 1,000 battle deaths in a year (Sarkees & Wayman 2010; check threshold definition on the COW page before citing).

Data in this patch

• Intra-State War Battle Deaths 1816-2007 (COW): COW v4.1 decade tabulation (battle deaths only; unknown rows counted zero => lower bound).
• Battle deaths understate civil-war mortality: COW lists ~111,000 battle deaths for a Taiping phase, versus 20-30 million total deaths in published estimates.
• Pre-1816 civil wars (Han, Tang, Inca succession war, Roman civil wars) have no machine-readable casualty dataset located; they appear only as events.

Open items

Roman civil wars of the late Republic and the Chinese dynastic-transition wars are not yet records; propose as follow-up.

Citations

• sarkees2010-resort-to-war [formal] Meredith Reid Sarkees, Frank Whelon Wayman (2010). Resort to War: 1816-2007. CQ Press. https://openlibrary.org/works/OL16946778W. Verified 2026-10-11 (Open Library record found; edition exists, page-level not checked).
• cow-intrastate-war-data-v4.1 [formal] Meredith Reid Sarkees, Frank Wayman (2010). Correlates of War: Intra-State War Data, v4.1 (SideADeaths, SideBDeaths). Correlates of War Project. https://correlatesofwar.org/wp-content/uploads/Intra-StateWarData_v4.1.csv. Verified 2026-10-11 (resolves).
• fearon2003-ethnicity-insurgency [formal] James D. Fearon, David D. Laitin (2003). Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War. American Political Science Review 97(1). DOI 10.1017/S0003055403000534 (Crossref-verified). Verified 2026-10-11 (resolves).

Review status

SOFT draft; not Official. Claims are definitional or tied to a cited source; page-level locators not verified.