This book's unique perspective on the roots, dynamics and shaping force of civil war will be essential to our ongoing struggles with this seemingly interminable problem. And the language of civil war has burgeoned as democratic politics has become more violently fought. The West’s age of civil war may be over, but elsewhere it has exploded – from the Balkans to Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, Sri Lanka and, most recently, Syria. From the American Revolution to the Iraq war, pivotal decisions have hung on such shifts of perspective. The theme of David Armitages fascinating book is the impossibility of arriving at a straightforwardly neutral definition of civil war, such as would enable the. 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. Defining the term is acutely political, for ideas about what makes a war "civil" often depend on whether one is ruler or rebel, victor or vanquished, sufferer or outsider it can also shape a conflict’s outcome, determining whether external powers are involved or stand aside. Publishers Link ABOUT CIVIL WARS We think we know civil war when we see it. Yet ideas of what it is, and isn't, have a long and contested history. We think we know civil war when we see it. A highly original history of the least understood and most intractable form of organised human aggression, from ancient Rome to our present conflict-ridden world
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