The first third of his book centers on ancient Greece and particularly Rome, where he pins the originating concept of civil war to the first century BCE “Columns and capitols, amphitheaters and aqueducts, laws and Latin, would not be the only legacies of Rome to the world among the most enduring, and the most unsettling, was the category of civil war itself. “Not without reason, then, has civil war been chillingly described as ‘development in reverse.’”Īrmitage, being a historian, likes to look for beginnings. “The material and economic costs have been no less staggering,” Armitage writes, ticking off displacement, disease, squandered resources, lost civilian life. Since 1945, these civil conflicts have killed an estimated 25 million combatants, about half the casualties of World War II.
While 2014 clocked only one interstate conflict, a dustup between India and Pakistan with fewer than 50 casualties, “since 1989, an average of twenty intrastate wars have been in progress at any moment - about ten times the annual average globally between 18.” “Civil war has gradually become the most widespread, the most destructive, and the most characteristic form of organized human violence,” Armitage writes. Still, what has been notoriously hard to pin down legally and philosophically is gaining on us. Its unchecked slaughter stems partly from the wider world’s bedevilment over how to categorize the fighting - noble resistance or wanton terrorism, as President Bashar al-Assad would have it, or some mishmash in between? By clicking Sign up, you agree to our privacy policy.Īnyone trying to parse Syria’s current military conflagration will find time with “Civil Wars” well spent.
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