Historian offers peek into civil war
Civil Wars: A History in Ideas David Armitage Allen Lane
Civil war, according to Harvard historian David Armitage, has become “the most characteristic form of organized human violence,” and has been on a marked rise since the end of the Cold War.
But as a concept, civil war is a contested idea, which Armitage explores in his new book.
Some takeaways:
1 “Civil war” is often traced back to the Romans. In fact, Roman mythology held that the city was founded when Romulus murdered his brother Remus. And fratricide has been the central metaphor of civil war ever since.
2 The fratricidal nature of civil war is often considered “worse” than state-versus-state warfare, and in many ways it is. Armitage explains that wars within states last four times longer than wars between states – and the measure is growing. Civil wars also have a higher chance of recurrence: most civil wars in the last decade, Armitage reveals, were actually the resumptions of earlier conflicts. Civil wars also have the pesky habit of overflowing into bordering states.
3 There are three types of civil war: A) Successionist — “disputes over succession to a throne,” such as England’s Glorious Revolution (more on revolutions shortly); B) Supersessionist — “opposing parties battle for control over a single territory,” such as Julius Caesar battling Pompey for Rome; C) Secessionist — “the attempt by part of a political community to break away from the existing political authority and assert its own independence,” such as the U.S. Civil War.
4 Put simply, civil wars are thought to be the violent escalation of grievances, while “revolutions” are cast as idealistic — especially by victorious revolutionaries. A sign of a revolution’s success, Armitage says, is “retrospective rebranding,” and usually, continued violence against counterrevolutionaries. Armitage concludes that “civil war was the genus of which revolution is only a species.”
5 As with “genocide,” the de jure labelling of internal conflicts has de facto consequences. Armitage explains that while the Syrian population immediately understood its country to be embroiled in a civil war, the International Community of the Red Cross required more than a year and 17,000 deaths to do so. This is important because “only then could the relevant provisions of the Geneva Conventions be applied.”