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States are institutions, or more precisely, they are networks of institutions, a sort of meta-organization. We often speak of them as unitary actors for the sake of convenience, but this is an over-simplification. A state might consist of a legislature, an executive, a judiciary, a bureaucracy, a military, a police force…or multiples of all of those. Sometimes all those sub-state actors cooperate with each other for their mutual benefit, but sometimes they compete or even fight each other.

We sometimes call those fights “civil wars” or “insurgencies” or “coups” or “rebellions” but they all fall under the rubric of intra-state violence.

Sometimes, one sub-state actor might seek to supplant another as the paramount authority within the state, as with the struggle between parliament and the monarchy in the English Civil War. Sometimes, one sub-state actor seeks to establish its own monopoly over violence in a particular subsection of the state’s territory, as was the case in the US Civil War.

But we rarely think of intra-state conflict as “anarchism.”

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