Civil War: Ancient and Modern

Catalog description

Since the Second World War, the number of wars between states has fallen precipitously. At the same time the number of wars within states—civil wars—has skyrocketed. This makes understanding civil war urgent, and yet compared to war or peace, scholars have tremendous difficulty agreeing how to conceptualize civil war. Is civil war a disruption of politics, or the intensification of political conflict? What distinguishes a civil war from a revolution? And what distinguishes a criminal, an activist, or a terrorist from a combatant in a civil war? This course begins to address these questions by taking a genealogical approach to the concept of civil war, by tracing its roots in the Greek idea of "stasis" and the Roman concept of "bellum civile." We will explore how thinkers in the ancient Mediterranean described and compared internal conflicts, and how modern thinkers have taken up these debates to make sense of tumultuous politics and dark times from the Age of Revolutions to the modern day. Texts may include those by: Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Euripides, Livy, Appian, Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Martin Luther King, Carole Pateman and David Armitage.