Several reasons or factors can be at the origin of civil wars.
The first theory that could explain the outbreak of civil wars is the religious motive. Religious quarrels for thousands of years have been one of the main causes of civil wars throughout the world. In order to assuage their dominance, majority religions such as Islam and Christianity have been waging war in various countries to gain political and economic power, which has jeopardized the unity of the people and the country. (Farhana Morshed)”Although the role of religion in conflict and peacebuilding has mostly been depicted in binary terms: either as a source of violence or of reconciliation, it is quite complex to define the role of religion as there might have a wide array of other factors that might have relevance for a particular conflict.” Historically, this scourge has long persisted in Europe with many wars with the example of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) which opposed the Habsburgs of Spain and Austria are supported by the Catholic Church, oppose the Protestant German states allied with European powers to Protestant majority. This war eventually led to the Treaty of Westphalia (1648)
marked the end of the domination of religious authority in Europe and the emergence of secular states.
But nowadays this reality persists with the Islamic religion is highly positioned as the religion that has generated the most conflicts in recent years. Following (Monica Duffy Toft) “In 42 religious civil wars from 1940 to 2000, incumbent governments and rebels who identified with Islam were involved in 34 (81 percent), far more than those identifying
From the illustration of this theory, we must recognize that civil wars are due to religious factors, however, can they not be due to political factors?
The second plausible theory to illustrate civil wars is the political parameter. (SIPRI, 2000), it was stated that “…Africa is the most conflict-ridden region of the World and the only region in which the number of armed conflicts is on the increase.” Indeed, this reality is more striking in several Third World countries, particularly in Africa, where the inhabitants are confronted with the weakness of institutions, the irresponsibility of their leaders, who are incapable of conforming to an exemplary democracy, which leads to political wars. Fearson (2011) found that “the quality of a country’s governance or institutions strongly predicted its risk of civil war outbreak” Among these African countries that have been confronted with political wars, Angola appears as one of the perfect examples on this continent. To this effect, this country has endured more than 27 years of civil war divided into three periods (1975-1991, 1992-1994, and 1998-2002). At the beginning of the war in 1961, it was just a question of independence and decolonization, until 1975 with the emergence of political parties such as the FNLA, which fought the MPLA with the support of UNITA. It is noted that this war was in period of cold war from where the intervention of the USSR and the USA making this conflict even more bloody with more than half a million dead and the double in exile, in the same way, it weakened by depicting the economic, infrastructural, religious fabric and the unicity of the country.