Do Low-Intensity Civil Wars Exist?

A Conceptual and Empirical Debate

by Andrea Molle

(Cover picture: a collection of The New York Post titles)

Introduction

The assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in 2025 has reignited debates about the trajectory of political violence in the United States. Commentators from across the political spectrum have invoked the notion of a “low-intensity civil war” to describe a climate marked by partisan polarization, sporadic armed clashes, and the erosion of norms of political civility. While the United States clearly does not resemble Syria in 2012 or Spain in the 1930s, the persistence of politically motivated attacks, armed militias, and rhetorical dehumanization of opponents has fueled speculation that the country may be entering a qualitatively new phase of domestic conflict. This raises important theoretical and empirical questions: can advanced democracies experience “low-intensity civil wars,” and if so, how should scholars distinguish them from terrorism, hate crimes, or political unrest? Situating the American case within broader debates on the definition of civil war highlights both the limitations and the potential insights of applying the “low-intensity” framework to contemporary democratic politics.

Definitional Issues

Civil war is conventionally defined as armed conflict between the state and organized non-state groups that results in at least 1,000 battle-related deaths in a single year. This threshold—used in most datasets such as UCDP/PRIO or the Correlates of War—ensures comparability but excludes many prolonged, deadly conflicts. The “low-intensity” label usually describes cases where violence is politically motivated, sustained, and organizationally coordinated, but does not escalate into high-casualty campaigns. The U.S. case complicates this picture: while annual fatalities from explicitly political violence remain far below the 1,000 threshold, the persistence of targeted assassinations, militia activity, and violent extremist plots creates a sense of chronic instability. The question becomes whether such a pattern represents a qualitatively different form of domestic politics or simply episodic unrest in a polarized democracy.

Empirical Cases

Several historical examples illustrate this ambiguity. Northern Ireland’s “Troubles” produced around 3,500 deaths over thirty years, never reaching the annual threshold of a “full” civil war but clearly involving organized armed groups and sustained political objectives. Colombia’s insurgency with the FARC lasted for decades, with violence highly uneven across regions and periods. Similarly, Afghanistan before the 2021 collapse exhibited geographically concentrated violence while other regions remained relatively stable. In each of these cases, states retained partial institutional capacity even as armed groups mounted persistent challenges. The United States, in 2025, appears analogous in the sense that the federal government remains intact, but the social fabric is strained by partisan hostility, localized outbreaks of violence, and organized extremist activity. The cumulative effect, while not yet resembling traditional civil war, aligns with what some scholars and policymakers describe as “low-intensity” conflict.

Scholarly Debate

The debate is fundamentally about thresholds and analytical categories. Fearon and Laitin argue that most modern civil wars take the form of insurgencies characterized by dispersed, low-level violence rather than major battles, making the boundary between “minor conflict” and “civil war” inherently porous. Kalyvas emphasizes that violence in civil wars is often fragmented and localized, which means that national-level casualty counts may obscure the lived reality of war for those directly affected. Applying this lens to the U.S., one could argue that while the country as a whole does not resemble a civil war, communities directly targeted by extremist violence may experience conditions that functionally mirror “low-intensity” conflict. Critics, however, caution against stretching the definition: categorizing U.S. political violence as a civil war risks conflating hate crimes, terrorism, and organized insurgency, thereby reducing analytical precision.

Conclusion

Low-intensity civil wars exist as empirical realities even if they fall outside strict dataset definitions. They demonstrate that conflict can remain politically consequential without ever reaching “high-intensity” thresholds. The current American debate reflects this tension: some argue that events like the Kirk assassination signal the drift toward an irregular, low-level civil war, while others see them as manifestations of democratic backsliding and extremist violence short of war. Ultimately, the U.S. case underscores the importance of conceptual clarity. Scholars must balance the need for comparability in definitions with sensitivity to the evolving forms of political violence, particularly in advanced democracies that face the possibility of sustained, below-threshold conflict.

References

Fearon, James D., and David D. Laitin. Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War. American Political Science Review 97, no. 1 (2003): 75–90.

Gleditsch, Nils Petter, Peter Wallensteen, Mikael Eriksson, Margareta Sollenberg, and Håvard Strand. Armed Conflict 1946–2001: A New Dataset. Journal of Peace Research 39, no. 5 (2002): 615–637.

Kalyvas, Stathis N. The Logic of Violence in Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Sambanis, Nicholas. What Is Civil War? Conceptual and Empirical Complexities of an Operational Definition. Journal of Conflict Resolution 48, no. 6 (2004): 814–858.

Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP). UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset. Uppsala University & PRIO, various years.