While the focus on Skocpol's book is international conflict and foreign wars, Rosemary O’Kane argues that the focus in understanding social revolutions should be civil wars instead. According to O’Kane, it is important to explore the decisions and policy implementations of the new state to see how they were affected by war, which Skocpol does not do. Skocpol, O’Kane says, “seems to stress the importance of international over national factors,” while still having civil war as an important factor in her argument. Skocpol's lack of focus on civil wars leads to the failure in her analysis. She fails to realize the “centralized control over the revolutionary forces of internal coercion.”