Definition
Internecine refers to a conflict or struggle within a group, organization, or society that causes great harm or destruction.
Pronunciation
US English
UK English
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Excerpts from News Articles
1
This conference has managed to pass its top legislative priority, a sprawling energy package that has a snowball’s chance of advancing through the Senate. But, thanks to internecine squabbling, Republicans have had to delay several major measures they had aimed to address early on, including a border security bill and a budget plan. Likewise, their orgy of investigations into all things Biden has had trouble gaining traction.
2
A UN report suggested that lethal autonomous weapons with a “fire, forget and find” capability were already used in Libya’s internecine conflict in 2020 when Turkish-made Kargu-2 drones in full-automatic mode attacked an unspecified number of combatants.
3
Warlords in a country long-riven by militias and insurgencies, the two are now locked in a classic internecine conflict. “Both sides have bases across the country,” said Alan Boswell, head analyst for the Horn of Africa at the International Crisis Group think tank, to the Financial Times. “Both see this fight in existential terms. This is a pure power struggle for who will control Sudan.”
4
The SNP’s internecine warfare has dominated political chatter for the past two months and the Scottish Conservatives, it seems, have been feeling left out. So, at the weekend, the Tories piped up. Douglas Ross, the Scottish leader, suggested that unionists should use their vote at the next general election for the candidate most likely to defeat the SNP incumbent.
5
Ever since Monty Python created their internecine , bickering and ridiculous groups of freedom fighters – the People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front – for their 1979 film The Life of Brian, it’s always been easy and tempting to mock and deride the fissiparous nature of ideologues and tin-pot revolutionaries.
6
Now, a void will be left in Carlson’s wake. But his words cannot be untold. His language now flows throughout the bloodstream of modern Republican rhetoric. While the far-right flank of the GOP will have one fewer outlet on which to pontificate, his words have won the argument in the internecine feuds within the Republican Party. And that cannot be untold.
7
All these shenanigans – including, at the more comical end, Rupert’s farcically short-lived engagement to Ann Lesley Smith, a 66-year-old evangelical former dental hygienist from Petaluma, California – have been rendered starkly through the mirror held up by Succession, HBO’s blockbuster TV series. The show follows the internecine Roy family disputes at a media conglomerate that doesn’t look wildly dissimilar to the Murdoch estate.
8
No time could be more unpropitious for a journey through that land. For some years an internecine warfare had been carried on between the North-West Company, operating from Canada, claiming a right to the fur trade from priority of discovery, and holding commissions as justices of peace from the colonial government, and the Hudson’s Bay Company, which, in virtue of a charter from King Charles the Second, attempted to maintain an exclusive authority over all the vast territory drained by the rivers that fall into the bay.
9
Battles for the ear of this shallow and capricious monarch turned his court into the scene of constant internecine struggle between the ever-shifting factions within the building. After the fall of Dominic Cummings, we hear Johnson whingeing about his inability to find the personnel or the structures to make his government functional, but several inside accounts suggest that he relished being at the centre of the tornado of chaos.
10
Tatarsky’s killing added to a growing list of opaque, internecine battles on the sidelines of the war in Ukraine, for which neither side has claimed responsibility. His murder echoed a car bombing last August that killed Darya Dugina, a close friend of Tatarsky and the daughter of neo-fascist Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin.