CIVIL WAR: A GENEALOGY

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Date: October 31st
Time: 6:00-8:00pm
Place: Skylight Room
(9100)

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Civil war is like pornography- we think we know it when we see it. Yet ideas of civil war have a long and contested history with multiple meanings and contested applications. This lecture offers a critical history of conceptions of civil war from ancient Rome to recent events in Iraq and Syria, with special attention to American debates in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. The application of the term “civil war” can depend on whether you are a ruler or a rebel, the victor or the vanquished, an established government or an interested third party. It can also determine whether outside powers intervene, which provisions of international humanitarian laws, and what international aid bodies like the World Bank are willing to invest in war-torn countries. Conflict over its meaning, as well as the meaning of conflict, demand historical reconstruction to illuminate contemporary confusions about civil war.

DAVID ARMITAGE is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at Harvard University, where he teaches intellectual history and international history. A prize-winning teacher and writer, he is the author or editor of thirteen books, including The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (2000), which won the Longman History Today Book of the Year Award, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (2007), which was chosen as a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year, and Foundations of Modern International Thought (2013). He is currently working on a history of ideas of civil war from Rome to the present and co-authoring a manifesto urging long-range historical thinking against the short-termism of our times.

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