There might be a bit of violence, but if you think that Americans are going to all out war instead of just accepting the election results and whining about it on twitter then you're mistaken.

  • Lil_Revolitionary [she/her,they/them]
    ·
    4 years ago

    How many protesters need to get shot, how many buildings need to burn before it "counts" as a civil war? Police violence is being met with massive protests and those arent exactly peaceful. I cant see this calming down over time, not in the short term

    • KoeRhee [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      I think opposing factions need to hold territory before we're in civil war mode. Keep in mind civil wars, coups, revolutions, insurgencies, uprisings, and low intensity conflicts all have similarities with each other but differ in a lot of ways depending on power dynamics and who wins/writes the history. I think America is prob gonna deal with mass protests and numerous right wing lone wolf attacks in the short term. Long term is too tough to say.

      • MagisterSinister [he/him,comrade/them]
        ·
        4 years ago

        Keep in mind civil wars, coups, revolutions, insurgencies, uprisings, and low intensity conflicts all have similarities with each other but differ in a lot of ways depending on power dynamics and who wins/writes the history.

        Yes, there's definitely political factors at play if something gets called a war officially or if there's euphemisms like "peace process", "intervention" etc. But that propagandistic dimension is entirely seperate from if something is observably a war. Nobody would deny that there's a war in Afghanistan - except for my government, which still doesn't call it that. The most it could concede in almost 20 years was "these are conditions as in war."

        When we leave propaganda aside and look at what's actually going on, i disagree that there's a clear-cut difference between civil war and the other conflicts you list. A coup, a revolution, an insurgency or an uprising can easily be viewed as the first confrontations in a civil war if they do not succeed or aren't crushed outright, but develop into prolonged battles. Being a low intensity conflict applies to many civil wars as well. Civil war economies are, by definition, both civil wars and need to be low-intensity to generate profits for the warlords involved. A Protracted People's War is systematically drawn out to wear the enemy down over time instead of seeking a direct confrontation, which reduces the scale and frequency of battles drastically.

        If something is still an armed conflict or already a war is a matter of scale. One of the replies here is "A civil war is when people are trying to actively kill each other", but organized sides are also trying to kill each other in fights between gangs and normally, calling these a gang war or mob war is a hyperbolic, dramatizing figure of speech. But there's situations where battles between cartels escalate so much they are more like a war than just a lot of crime. In the drug war in Mexico, more than 200,000 people have been killed since 2006, there's been hundreds of thousands of combattants involved. That's bigger than a lot of conventional wars, there's conflict researchers that rank it as an actual war and i'm inclined to agree with them. But aside from the sheer scale, there's nothing setting that war aside from just having lots of very violent organized crime. People wouldn't consider it really a war simply because it had less casualties.