Before its release as the opening track on the Guns N' Roses album Use Your Illusion II in 1991, “Civil War” first appeared on the 1990 charity compilation Nobody’s Child: Romanian Angel Appeal. It was also released as an EP in 1993 and included on the band’s Greatest Hits album in 2004.
In his autobiography, Slash stated that the song was initially an instrumental he created before the Japanese leg of the Appetite for Destruction tour. Later, Rose would write the lyrics and shape it into a full song. Because it was recorded in 1990, it is the only song on the Use Your Illusion albums to feature Steven Adler playing drums, due to his playing being negatively affected by his heroin habit—the final cut is a mix of 20–30 takes, mixed to allow the rest of the band to be able to follow it properly. First played live at Farm Aid in 1990, this also marked original drummer Adler’s first and last time performing the song.
Created as an anti-war protest song, it features lead vocalist Axl Rose whistling the song “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” which was written during the American Civil War. Other featured samples are speeches from a Peruvian Shining Path guerrilla general and the 1967 movie, Cool Hand Luke.
Duff McKagan explained the origins of “Civil War” during an interview on Rockline:
Basically it was a riff that we would do at sound-checks. Axl came up with a couple of lines at the beginning. And… I went to a peace march, when I was a little kid, with my mom. I was like four years old. For Martin Luther King. And that’s when: “Did you wear the black arm band when they shot the man who said: ‘Peace could last forever’?” It’s just true-life experiences, really.
However, that line is not actually a direct quote of MLK; it’s more of what Duff took away from his message.