TAKEAWAYS FROM CIVIL WARS: A HISTORY IN IDEAS

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. Here are your takeaways:

1 “Civil war” is often traced back to the Romans. In f act, 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 vs. state warfare, and in many ways it is. Armitage explains that wars within states last four t i mes l onger t han 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 re- branding,” 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 t hat 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 Convention be applied.”