ABSTRACT
Throughout the past centuries another form of political violence seems to have dominated, namely inter-state war. Inter-state wars were to some extent regulated by certain norms. The formal declaration of war was one of these norms. After the Second World War, however, inter-state wars have become rare. Civil war became the typical form of war (see Siccama and Oostindiër 1995: 10). How many civil wars have broken out since 1945 is to some extent a matter of definition: what, after all, is a ‘civil war’? And, in the absence of a formal declaration of war, when does it break out?
