996010 Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (S) (SoSe 2016)

http://scholar.harvard.edu/armitage/home

Since the Second World War, and especially since 1989, civil war— organised conflict fought by those who recognise each other as members of the same community or polity—has become humanity’s most characteristic and most destructive form of collective violence. Yet despite civil war’s prevalence and long-term impact, study of it remains both theoretically impoverished and temporally foreshortened. This seminar examines conceptions of civil war over the longue durée, from the ancient Mediterranean to contemporary ‘global civil war,’ and juxtaposes readings on civil war from the humanities and social sciences, in order to advance understanding of the essentially contested concepts surrounding a seemingly interminable historical phenomenon.

Thursday 9 June

Session 1: 10:30 am–noon

Stathis N. Kalyvas, ‘Civil Wars,’ in Carles Boix and Susan C. Stokes, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 416– 34.
David Armitage, ‘What’s the Big Idea? Intellectual History and the Longue Durée,’ History of European Ideas, 38, 4 (December 2012): 493–507.
David Armitage, ‘Preface’ and ‘Introduction: Confronting Civil War,’ in Armitage, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017), pp. 5–39.

Session 2: 1:30–3:00 pm

Giorgio Agamben, ‘Stasis,’ in Agamben, Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm, trans.
Nicholas Heron (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), pp. 1–24.
David Armitage, ‘Inventing Civil War: The Roman Tradition’ and ‘Remembering Civil War: Roman Visions,’ in Armitage, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas, pp. 41–102.

Session 3: 3:30–5:00 pm

Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Historical Criteria of the Modern Concept of Revolution,’ in Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), pp. 43–57.
Giorgio Agamben, ‘Leviathan and Behemoth,’ in Agamben, Stasis, pp. 25–69.

David Armitage, ‘Uncivil Civil Wars: The Seventeenth Century’ and ‘Civil War in an Age of Revolutions: The Eighteenth Century,’ in Armitage, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas, pp. 104–77.

Friday 10 June

Session 4: 10:30 am–noon

Harry Eckstein, ‘On the Etiology of Internal Wars,’ History and Theory, 4, 2 (1965): 133– 63.
David Armitage, ‘Civilizing Civil War: The Nineteenth Century’ and ‘Worlds of Civil War: The Twentieth Century,’ in Armitage, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas, pp. 179–259.

Session 5: 1:30–3:00 pm—Graduate Student Presentations Session 6: 3:30–5:00 pm
Jan Angstrom, ‘Towards a Typology of Internal Armed Conflict: Synthesising a Decade of Conceptual Turmoil,’ Civil Wars, 4, 3 (Autumn 2001): 93–116.
Bill Kissane, ‘Epilogue: Civil War and Human Divisiveness,’ in Kissane, Nations Torn Asunder: The Challenge of Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 217–38.
David Armitage, ‘Civil Wars, From Beginning … to End?,’ American Historical Review, 120, 5 (December 2015): 1829–37.
David Armitage, ‘Conclusion: Civil Wars of Words,’ in Armitage, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas, pp. 260–67.

Bibliography

Armitage, David. In Press, 2017. Civil Wars: A History in Ideas. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.