It was called a rebellion in particular by Abraham Lincoln, who called it a rebellion six times more often than he called it a civil war. To go back to a key point in my book, and the larger story of civil wars, the US civil war – one of the largest conflicts in the middle of the 19th century – was relatively rarely called a civil war while it was going on. It is often the transformation of one form of conflict into another that marks the boundaries between legitimacy and illegitimacy.
These are both political categories and thus politicised categories which are deployed for tactical advantage by different parties. There is no natural category of rebellions or civil wars. Is there a pattern we can draw? When does an armed rebellion turn into a civil war? That division of the politics of naming of civil wars is an indication of how much power resides in the name, and how far the naming becomes the framing of the conflict leading to enormous implications for international interventions, humanitarian aid and thus ultimately for the lives of all those who are affected by these conflicts and who may be looking for support and legitimation for their part of those conflicts. If a war is a civil war, it is an internal conflict, inside another country, it is often used to denote conflicts as being ethnic, atavistic, backward-looking, and something that great powers like the US should stay out of. Or it can work in another direction – of outside powers, for political purposes, thinking of a conflict as a civil war in order to deny the possibility of intervention, as the case in Syria. It can work in identifying two sides or even more than two sides in a conflict as legitimate belligerents, worthy of the protection of the Geneva Conventions and international humanitarian law. To use the term civil war now can work in two directions. That maps very closely how modern conceptions of civil wars have involved the politics of legitimating or delegitimating different parties. What I have tried to do is trace how ideas of civil war have changed as different communities and experts have intervened to depoliticize or redefine what is or is not a civil war.įor instance, the first legal attempts to define a civil war came in the 19th century in the context of the US civil war because of the pressure to define the illegitimacy of one side, the Confederacy.
I am trying to see why we seem, even now in the 21st century, so confused about what is or is not a civil war, why those categories are so politicised and ideological in relation to particular conflicts like those in Iraq or Syria in recent years. It is an attempt to trace over 2000 years, going all the way back to Republican Roman, the genesis and genealogy of the ideas of the civil war till the present. Could you tell us something about the book and how civil wars have evolved over the centuries? He spoke to the Hindustan Times about his book. His latest book, Civil Wars – A History in Ideas, has been hailed in the western academic community and media as a breakthrough in the study of civil wars. David Armitage is a renowned Harvard historian.
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