Civil Wars: A History in Ideas, by David Armitage

David Armitage's new book Civil Wars invites us on a structured romp through a historian's playground of ideas. In three parts, he takes us from the Roman genesis of civil war as a phenomenon and phrase, through a dizzying span of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century wars and revolutions in Europe, and into a surprising, legally grounded approach to understanding contemporary civil wars. For scholars of political violence and civil war, Armitage forces our attention back to foundational assumptions of a key concept. For casual readers, he challenges received wisdom about domestic power politics and the very premise of ‘us’ and ‘them’.