In Civil Wars, the eminent historian David Armitage offers an invaluable illumination of this vexing subject. So it has been in our own nation’s history: from the American Revolution (commonly referred to as a civil war while it was waged) to the US “Civil War” to the Second Gulf War-in each, pivotal decisions on the part of outside powers turned on precisely such shifts of perspective. Likewise, calling any particular conflict a civil war can shape its outcome by determining whether other nations choose to get involved or stand aside. Defining the term is an acutely political act: whether a war is “civil” often depends on whether one is a ruler or a rebel, victor or vanquished, participant or foreigner. Yet ideas of what it is, and what it isn’t, have a long and contested history, from its fraught origins in republican Rome to debates in early modern Europe down to the present day. We think we know civil war when we see it. A highly original history, tracing the least understood and most intractable form of organized human aggression from ancient Rome through the centuries to the present day.
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