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Damn never mind. I just made the post and thought to myself, damn man you didn't even search before posting your question and lo and behold
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I was having this train of thought recently that the American Revolutionary War against the British is much more like a civil war than the actual Civil War of 1861.
The Revolutionary War was a war between the seating government and a disenfranchised group that had little to no political power. The only thing making it not a civil war is that the government's "seat of power" (I don't know if that is an accurate term) is, geographically speaking, not based inside the state itself.
The Civil War was a war between the seating government and a group of people that, for all intents and purposes, had complete economic and political sovereignty. The only thing making it a Civil War is that the United States are considered one nation.
It feels a little like the Revolutionary War was more of a civil war than the Civil War. Or at the very least that both are not really civil wars.
Similarly to genocide having strict academic definitions, are there some strict definitions about civil war that I could compare to these two events?
There's no harm in asking a good question twice! As the original responder in the linked thread, happy to address any follow ups you might have (although my ability to comment on 18-19th century American history is... limited).
I would highlight that civil war isn't as strictly defined as genocide, partly due to academic neglect (there's a reason Armitage's book was a big deal), but also because genocide had to be defined legally as well as conceptually when it was written into international law after the Second World War (most obviously in the 1948 Convention on Genocide). Civil War, on the other hand, is not a crime in and of itself.