Second, how might we approach and understand the proliferation of the language of (civil) war, the use of the concept as a metaphor for disagreement, into wider political discourse, as noted by Armitage?Ī genealogy of the kind presented by Armitage has its roots in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and was practiced to great effect by Michel Foucault. First, how does civil war relate to our understanding of war more generally, insofar as we can argue that civil war is one subset of a broader activity or practice called “war”? Such a connection is particularly salient given debates within several fields, most notably in the IR subfields of critical war and security studies, regarding changing concepts and ontologies of war and peace. In reviewing this book, I will approach Civil Wars with two main questions in mind. Armitage’s new book is also, if we are to use a “fashionable term of art”, a genealogy (15), but more on this in a moment. It is an exponent of the kind of longue durée history advocated by Armitage and Guldi in their History Manifesto (2014) – the present book begins in ancient Rome and ends in contemporary Syria. David Armitage’s new book, Civil Wars, brings together several trains of thought pursued by Armitage himself and others in recent years.
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