Those elements would remain at the heart of concepts of civil war for much of its history. Perhaps having been first to define what was “civil”-meaning, among fellow citizens-they inevitably understood their most wrenching conflicts in definitively political terms, as clashes among citizens that rose to the level of war. The Romans were not the first to suffer internal conflict but they were the first to experience it as civil war. That invention, a little over two thousand years old, can be dated quite closely to the first century b.c.e. It was an artifact of human culture that had to be invented. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title.Ĭivil war was not a fact of nature, waiting to be discovered. This book's unique perspective on the roots and dynamics of civil war, and on its shaping force in our conflict-ridden world, will be essential to the ongoing effort to grapple with this seemingly interminable problem. And the language of civil war has burgeoned as democratic politics has become more violently fought. The age of civil war in the West may be over, but elsewhere in the last two decades it has exploded-from the Balkans to Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, and Sri Lanka, and most recently Syria. Calling a conflict a civil war can shape its outcome by determining whether outside powers choose to get involved or stand aside: from the American Revolution to the war in Iraq, pivotal decisions have depended on such shifts of perspective. Defining the term is acutely political, for ideas about what makes a war 'civil' often depend on whether one is a ruler or a rebel, victor or vanquished, sufferer or outsider. 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 to our 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.

Armitage civil wars