The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) has not adopted a particular definition of ‘civil war’.
International humanitarian law distinguishes between international armed conflicts and non-international armed conflicts, but contains no definition of these terms. Whether an armed conflict can be said to exist in a particular situation is essentially a question of fact depending on the surrounding circumstances. However, guidance for assessing whether a non-international armed conflict exists can be found in Additional Protocol II to the Geneva Conventions, which deals with the Protection of Victims of Non-International Armed Conflicts. Protocol II applies to conflicts between the forces of a state and
“dissident armed forces or other organised armed groups which, under responsible command, exercise control over part of the state’s territory to enable them to carry out a sustained and concerted military operations”.
The Protocol adds that
“situations of internal disturbances and tensions, such as riots, isolated and sporadic acts of violence and other acts of a similar nature”
do not constitute armed conflict.
A number of definitions of conflict, including of civil war, have been proposed by academics, usually as the basis for statistical analysis of the incidence and effect of conflicts. We have made some use of statistics based on particular definitions of conflict, for example in relation to the 2002 Public Service Agreementfor the joint FCO-Ministry of Defence-Department for International Development Conflict Prevention Pools. Measurement of success in delivering this Public Service Agreement was based on data produced by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, both of which use a definition of ‘major armed conflict’ referring to the use of armed force resulting in more than 1,000 battle-related deaths in a year. These statistical measurements were found to be unhelpful in determining the success of policies within the Conflict Prevention Pools and were not carried over into the 2004 Public Service Agreement.