We can no longer speak of a state of war in any traditional sense, yet there is currently no viable theory to account for the manifold internal conflicts, or civil wars, that increasingly afflict the world's populations. Meant as a first step toward such a theory, Giorgio Agamben's latest book looks at how civil war was conceived of at two crucial moments in the history of Western thought: in ancient Athens (from which the political concept of stasis emerges) (...) and later, in the work of Thomas Hobbes. It identifies civil war as the fundamental threshold of politicization in the West, an apparatus that over the course of history has alternately allowed for the de-politicization of citizenship and the mobilization of the unpolitical. The arguments herein, first conceived of in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, have become ever more relevant now that we have entered the age of planetary civil war. (shrink)

The vast majority of work on the ethics of war focuses on traditional wars between states. In this chapter, I aim to show that this is an oversight worth rectifying. My strategy will be largely comparative, assessing whether certain claims often defended in discussions of interstate wars stand up in the context of civil conflicts, and whether there are principled moral differences between the two types of case. Firstly, I argue that thinking about intrastate wars can help us make (...) progress on important theoretical debates in recent just war theory. Secondly, I consider whether certain kinds of civil wars are subject to a more demanding standard of just cause, compared to interstate wars of national-defence. Finally, I assess the extent to which having popular support is an independent requirement of permissible war, and whether this renders insurgencies harder to justify than wars fought by functioning states. (shrink)

A highly original history, tracing civil war, the least understood and most intractable form of organized human aggression, from Ancient Rome through the centuries to present day.

The four essays by Ashworth, Blackburn, Nimtz and Post all make important contributions to our understanding of the causes and consequences of the American Civil War, and to modern analysis of these questions within a Marxist tradition. Although they differ among themselves on key issues, they direct attention to problems too often neglected by other historians: the rôle of class-conflict within North and South in the coming of the War; the part played by slave-resistance in the sectional conflict; the (...) nature of the economic relationship between slave and free economies; and a shift in control of the national state as an enduring result of the conflict. (shrink)

Constructing Global Enemies asks how and why specific interpretations of international terrorism and drug abuse have become hegemonic at the global level. The book analyses the international discourses on terrorism and drug prohibition and compares efforts to counter both, not only from a contemporary but also from a historical perspective. Utilising poststructuralist theory of the relationship between hegemony and identity, Herschinger argues that hegemony is much more than just the dominance of a single country in international life; rather it is (...) the emergence of a hegemonic order that can best be understood as the production of a new collective identity. Offering an in-depth discussion of the methodology of discourse analysis, the book explores how such hegemonies emerge and persist in the field of security. This serves to explain the widespread disagreement regarding the fight against international terrorism as well as the successful suppression of counter-hegemonic projects in the field of international drug prohibition. Constructing Global Enemies will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations and security studies." from paperback back cover. (shrink)

Resumen: Diez años después de la muerte de Franco, la escritora catalana Maria Barbal publicó Pedra de tartera, una novela sobre la trayectoria vital de una campesina del Pirineo marcada por la Guerra Civil española. El objetivo de este artículo es demostrar que el éxito local e internacional de la obra reside en la capacidad de la voz narrativa por rememorar el pasado desde el posicionamiento ético en contra de los seculares poderes patriarcales y el compromiso con la denuncia (...) de la condición de la mujer. La obra de Barbal ha merecido una atención académica poco significativa, que además no ha profundizado en su dimensión de relato de guerra. Con el fin de situar Pedra de tartera en el corpus de narrativas de la memoria que abordan la Guerra Civil, proponemos una exégesis que pone el foco en el reconocimiento de la violencia patriarcal, bélica y postbélica que sufre la protagonista.: Ten years after Franco’s death, the Catalan writer Maria Barbal published Stone in a Landslide, a novel about the life story of a peasant woman of the Pyrenees marked by the Spanish Civil War. The aim of this paper is to prove that local and international success of the work lies in the ability of the narrative voice to remember the past from the ethical stance against the secular patriarchal powers and commitment to denouncing the woman’s condition. The work of Barbal still has not had the academic attention that it deserves, especially as a war narrative. In order to place Stone in a Landslide in the corpus of the narrative of memory addressing Civil War, we propose an exegesis that places the focus on the recognition of patriarchal, war and postwar violence suffered by the protagonist. (shrink)

`All over Italy men were conscripted, and weapons requisitioned; money was exacted from towns, and taken from shrines; and all the laws of god and man were overturned.' The Civil War is Caesar's masterly account of the celebrated war between himself and his great rival Pompey, from the crossing of the Rubicon in January 49 B.C. to Pompey's death and the start of the Alexandrian War in the autumn of the following year. His unfinished account of the continuing struggle (...) with Pompey's heirs and followers is completed by the three anonymous accounts of the Alexandrian, African, and Spanish Wars, which bring the story down to within a year of Caesar's assassination in March 44 B.C. This generously annotated edition places the war in context and enables the reader to grasp it both in detail and as a whole. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. (shrink)

Metaphors of medicine are common, such as war, which is evident in much of our language about health‐care where patients and healthcare professionals fight disease, or the game, which is one way to frame the nurse–doctor professional relationship. This study analyses six pilot episodes of American (Grey's Anatomy, Hawthorne, Mercy, Nurse Jackie) and Australian (All Saints, RAN) medical television programmes premiering between 1998 and 2009 to assess one way that our contemporary culture understands and constructs professional relationships between nurses and (...) doctors. Analysis shows that these popular television programmes frequently depict conflict, with games, civil war and mutiny between nurses and doctors over patient safety rather than professionals working collaboratively in teams to deliver health‐care. Although the benefit of this televised conflict is the implication that nurses are knowledgeable, skilled professionals, the negative connotations include a dysfunctional and dangerous healthcare system, and also ongoing power struggles. Given that popular culture can sometimes influence the public's understanding of real‐life nursing practice, it is important to explore what these metaphors of conflict are communicating about the nurse–doctor relationship. (shrink)

The discussion of the American Civil War as a bourgeois revolution, reopened by John Ashworth’s recent work, needs to be based on a more explicit conceptualisation of what the category does, and does not, involve. This essay offers one such conceptualisation. It then deals with two key issues raised by the process of bourgeois revolution in the United States: the relationship between the War of Independence and the Civil War, and whether the nature of the South made conflict (...) unavoidable. It then argues that the American Revolution is unique for two reasons: the non-feudal nature of Southern society and the fact that the Northern industrial bourgeoisie, unlike their European contemporaries, were still prepared to behave in a revolutionary way. (shrink)

Plutarch’s exuberant writings reaped praise in both antique and modern times. Various aspects of his work have been amply studied and analysed, yet some remain less discussed. This paper therefore aims to contribute to the ongoing research of his works by examining Plutarch’s references to stasis in general, and more particularly to the Roman civil wars. Plutarch lived through the civil wars of 69 CE, and although he did not suffer by experiencing them directly, these events no doubt (...) contributed to his views on the role of stasis and civil war, especially in Roman history. While Plutarch does not openly express his convictions on these events, especially not on contemporary occurrences, civil unrest is nevertheless a deliberate and significant theme in all of his writings. This paper presents various examples from Plutarch’s work which illuminate his particular understanding of Roman civil dissension and the ways in which he cleverly and meticulously approached this issue, being aware of the threat it may have posed him during the principate. (shrink)

Constitutional Royalism and the Search for Settlement, 1640?1649. By David L. Smith (Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xiv + 371 pp. Intelligence and Espionage in the Reign of Charles II, 1660?1685. By Alan Marshall (Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xvi + 334 pp. Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678?81. By Mark Knights (Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xv + 424 pp.

We examine how social diversity and inclusiveness on corporate boards affect corporate performance and monitoring in Sri Lanka, a country subject to decades of polarization, civil war, and even genocide. Barely more than a decade after the civil war, we find that board social diversity on the basis of ethnicity, religion, language, gender, and nationality of the board members is positively related to corporate performance, both in terms of stock market performance and accounting returns, and to corporate financial (...) stability. The main positive effects of social diversity derive from ethno-linguistic inclusiveness. The results are confirmed by an instrumental variable approach that addresses endogeneity issues. We find no evidence that inter-personal and moral conflicts or communication problems among board members negatively affect firm performance. (shrink)

While it is no secret that Valerius Flaccus’Argonauticaexplores civil-war themes at great length, the conflicts arising on the island of Peuce between the Colchians and the Argonauts and within the Argonautic party itself in the epic's final book (8.217–467) have been overlooked in critical studies of Valerian civil war. This article argues that Valerius presents the conflicts on Peuce as examples of civil war—emphasizing the bonds of kinship between the conflicting parties and illustrating effects of this discord (...) using imagery of stasis and cosmic dissolution associated with civil war in the wider Latin literary tradition—and thus invites reflection on the development and manifestation of internecine strife within theArgonautica. (shrink)

Civil wars vary greatly in their duration. This book argues that conflicts are longer when they involve more actors who can block agreement and identifies specific problems that arise in multi-party bargaining. Quantitative analysis of over 200 civil wars since World War II reveals that conflicts with more of these actors last much longer than those with fewer. Detailed comparison of negotiations in Rwanda and Burundi demonstrates that multi-party negotiations present additional barriers to peace not found in two (...) party conflicts. In addition, conflicts with more veto players produce more casualties, are more likely to involve genocide and are followed by shorter periods of peace. Because they present many barriers to peace, the international community has a poor track record of resolving multi-party conflicts. David Cunningham shows that resolution is possible in these wars if peace processes are designed to address the barriers that emerge in multi-party conflicts. (shrink)

The Civil War generated hundreds of history paintings. Yet, as this essay argues, painters failed to create any iconic, lasting images of the Civil War using the conventions of grand manner history painting, despite the expectations of many that they would and should. This essay first examines the terms by which I am evaluating this failure, then moves on to a consideration of the American history painting tradition. I next examine several history paintings of Civil War scenes (...) in light of this tradition and argue that their “failure” to capture the meaning and essence of the war resulted from a breakdown of the narrative conventions of history painting. Finally, I glance briefly at Winslow Homer’s Civil War scenes, arguably the only ones which have become canonical, and suggest that the success of these images comes from their abandonment of old conventions and the invention of new ones. (shrink)

Carl Schmitt is the most important anti-liberal political theorist of the European interwar period (1918-1939). His theories on the state of exception, dictatorship, and his criticism of parliamentary democracy are very well known. However, what remains unknown to this day is how his ideas had a remarkable influence on the ideologues of the Francoist state between 1939 and 1942. During these years, a debate developed among Francoist jurists about whether Francisco Franco was a “sovereign dictator,” that is, a dictator legitimized (...) by popular consent, or rather a new kind of “monarch” that emerged in the context of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). This paper aims to explain how two ideological factions formed in Francoist Spain. The “Decisionist Francoism” of Juan Beneyto Pérez, Francisco Elías de Tejada, and Luis Legaz Lacambra held that Franco emerged as a reaction to the process of “legalization” triggered by liberalism in Spain. The “Weberian Francoism” of Francisco Javier Conde held that Franco was a charismatic and traditional leader whose position emerged in response to the Civil War. I explain how three concepts of Schmitt's anti-iberalism inspired Francoist theorists: political theology, dictatorship, and the rejection of parliamentary democracy. (shrink)

In a well-known 1964 essay on the “recovery” of American religious history, Henry F. May observed that some scholars had “revived” religious interpretations of the nation's greatest political crises, including the Civil War. But there was more work to be done. “A religious, or partly religious explanation of the Civil War,” May suggested, would “rest on two assertions: that serious and intractable moral conflicts were important in causing the war and that in nineteenth-century America such conflicts were particularly (...) difficult to avoid or compromise because of the dominance of evangelical Protestantism in both sections.” In fact, both the importance of the moral conflict over slavery and the role of evangelicalism in intensifying hostilities were already attracting attention as historians reexamined previous emphases on economic factors and political bungling as explanations of a tragically unnecessary war. (shrink)

This article attempts to answer why some countries experience the recurrence of civil war and others do not. One of the most significant differences between civil war onset and its recurrence is that the latter has once experienced termination of civil war, while the former has not. To find the cause of recurrence, this article examines how different war termination types influence the duration of post-civil war peace. Duration analysis of the civil wars between 1944 (...) and 1999 shows that military victory, supported by peacekeeping operations or power-sharing arrangements, leads to the most durable peace in a post-civil war country. Contrary to the accepted wisdom, negotiated peace settlement, even when supported by peacekeeping operations or power-sharing arrangements, is not positively related to post-conflict peace. (shrink)

This article analyzes whether state repression in post—civil war situations can be explained by dynamics associated with previous civil wars. It claims that in post—civil war situations the state can more easily resort to indiscriminate repression against social groups, relying on information related to the civil war. Two civil war dynamics are tested: preemptive indiscriminate violence to eliminate opposition by the defeated population and retaliation for crimes committed during the war. Using data from the first (...) decade of the Francoist regime in Spain, the author found that civil war dynamics, and not actual dissent, explain most of the country’s postwar violence. (shrink)

This essay replies to critics of my earlier piece in Historical Materialism which looked at the origins of the American Civil War. The essay re-emphasises the importance of the shift to wage labour in the North, it re-asserts the need to incorporate slave resistance as a key factor in any causal account of the sectional conflict, and it argues that the ultimate northern victory in that conflict should be seen as constituting a ‘bourgeois revolution’. It engages specifically with the (...) criticisms and some of the alternative interpretations offered by Charles Post, Eric Foner and Neil Davidson. (shrink)

Benson: Certain logical principles govern explanations of human behavior: alleged causes must actually occur before their effects; men must be aware of events that allegedly affect them; explanations must jibe with generalizations about behavior and have intrinsic plausibility. Historians often neglect these principles. The best example is analysis of public opinion. Comparison of Thucydides with the historiography of the American Civil War shows both must assess public feeling on specific issues at a given time and place; but historians lack (...) the tools to do this, and have recourse to dubious assumptions . Sometimes even the principle of chronological priority is violated. Consistent application of the four logical principles above would at least narrow the range of potentially verifiable explanations and consequent disagreement.Strout: Specification of a "fundamental cause" of the Civil War or other events is best construed as a retrospective observation that the cited 16cause" figures centrally in some reconstructed story. Historians explain through stories, narrations, which aim at comprehending the dramatic "logic" of a sequence of events rather than at scientific explanation. At worst general questions of causality are an irrelevant source of interminable disagreement, at best a stimulus to research, potentially resulting in a more coherent story and increased understanding. Causal accounts seem indispensable largely because explanations often involve purposes and reasons in causal disguise. (shrink)

A great deal of violence in civil wars is informed by the logic of terrorism: violence tends to be used by political actors against civilians in order to shape their political behavior. I focus on indiscriminate violence in the context of civil war: this is a type of violence that selects its victims on the basis of their membership in some group and irrespective of their individual actions. Extensive empirical evidence suggests that indiscriminate violence in civil war (...) is informed by the logic of terrorism. I argue that under certain conditions, that tend to be quite common, such violence is counter productive. I specify these conditions and address the following paradox: why do we sometimes observe instances of indiscriminate violence evenunder conditions that make this strategy counterproductive? I review four possible reasons: truncated data, ignorance, cost, and institutional constraints. I argue that indiscriminate violence emerges because it is much cheaper than its main alternative – selective violence. It is more likely under a steep imbalance of power between the competing actors, and where and when resources and information are low; however, most political actors eventually switch to selective violence. Thus, given a balance of power between competing actors, indiscriminate violence is more likely at early rather than late stages of the conflict. Overall, the paper suggests that even extreme forms of violence are used strategically. (shrink)

The concept of civil society continues to generate considerable interest, while the concept of civilization attracts comparatively little attention. This has led to a tendency to oversimplify the relationship between civil societies and militarily powerful sovereign states. Civil societies, it is often argued, are those societies that have emerged from a successful process of domestic pacification and effective control of state power. In this paper, it will be argued that some prominent Scottish Enlightenment thinkers developed theories of (...) civilization grounded in more complex historical narratives, in which the accomplishments of civil society were tied to the achievement of state sovereignty based on the successful monopoly of military might. The purpose of this paper is to trace the role of state sovereignty and military monopolization, and the consequent prominence given to the practice of war, in the “historical” theories of civilization articulated by David Hume, William Robertson, Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson. (shrink)

Foreword -- 1. The War Within -- 2. The Cult of Experience -- 3. The Long March -- 4. America's Transformers -- 5. American Restoration -- 6. Twenty-twenty Vision -- Acknowledgments.