sybrina fulton and tracy martin, the parents of the late trayvon martin, remember their son's life and death. at 10, historians discuss john adams' fears of the political influence of the wealthy. and we wrap up our sunday prime time lineup at 11 with brad snyder who reports on the impact of a political salon in washington, d.c. during the early 20th century. that all happens tonight on c-span2's booktv. first up, here's harvard university history professor david armitage. >> and now i am delighted to introduce tonight's author. david armitage is lloyd c. blankfein professor of history at harvard university and former chair of harvard's university -- or of harvard's history department.

he is an affiliated professor in the harvard department of government, an affiliated faculty member at harvard law school and an honorary fellow of st. catherine's college in cambridge. his previous books include the ideological origins of the british empire, winner of the longman history today book of the year award, the declaration of independence: a global history, which was a times literary supplement book of the year, and the history manifesto which was a new statesman book of the year. his new book, civil wars: a history and ideas, examines the history of the very notion of civil war from its roots in republican rome to the conflicts that have roiled the global south for the past two decades. questions of what makes a conflict not only a war, but a civil war rather than a foreign war or a revolution, are intensely political and depend on which warrior you ask. shifting definitions of the term have also determined foreign policy. do outside powers choose to arm

one side or the other or to stand aside? publishers weekly praised in its starred review armitage's book is a model of its kind; concise, winningly written, clearly laid out, trenchantly argued. it's hard to imagine a more timely work for today. we're very pleased that he is here at harvard bookstore with us tonight. please join me in welcoming david armitage. [applause] >> thank you so much, nell, for that very warm introduction, and thank you to the harvard bookstore for everything that you do here. i want to reaffirm everything nell has said and ask each one of you not to leave here tonight without buying at least one book. [laughter] i'd prefer it to be my book, but buy at least one book before you leave tonight. the doors will be locked until you do so. [laughter] many of us, i think, can remember a moment not so very long ago when history was supposed to end. the free market was going to

supplant every other form of economic organization. its elective affinity with democracy would insure that all other forms of politics succumbed to its advance. globalization would create a borderless world of unlimited prosperity and unassailable rights. progress would reach consummation in a county in utopia of perpetual peace. how long ago that all seems now. as we all know, history has bitten back and with a vengeance. it was drawing bath, it now seems, before springing back into action with ever more unsettling energy. mercantilism seems to be returning to slam globalization into reverse. the historically brief alliance between liberalism and democracy is coming apart at the seams. and the world is still a very violent place. states, for the moment, are mostly at peace with each other, but since 1989 wars within states have become the most

widespread, the most destructive and perhaps also the most characteristic form of organized human violence. indeed, of the 40 or so wars currently in progress around the world from afghanistan to yemen, only one is currently between two states, the conflict between india and pakistan over kashmir. all the rest of the world's major conflicts started originally within a single state or community. far from the better angels of our nature, winning the war upon war -- to quote titles of two recent books -- peace amongst states has been standing under a dark shadow of late. the shadow of civil war. the global estimate of battle deaths in civil war since 1945 is over 25 million people. that is about half the estimated direct casualties in the second world war itself. even that count does not include civilians, the wounded, refugees

or those who die from the knock-on effects of civil war such as disease and malnutrition. if we look beyond civil wars' human toll -- devastating though that has certainly been -- the impact has been no less appalling. think of the 500,000 syrians killed since 2011 and more than half of that country's populationing civil war has displaced but also remember as well as costing many lives, civil wars like syria with's waste resources, divert spending from welfare to warfare, disrupt economies, foment crime and disease and suppress productivity often for decades in civil war-torn societies. those hard-nosed economists who study global development calculate an annual price tag for civil wars at about $123 billion. that is roughly the equivalent of the amount the global north budgets for economic aid every year to the global south. not without reason then has civil war been chillingly described as development in reverse.

how are we to make sense of such mayhem on a global scale? under some circumstances, we might turn to social and political theory for the intellectual resources to grapple with such a major challenge. yet when it comes to civil war, we look in vain. there is no great work entitled on civil war to stand alongside, say, on war or on revolution. clause visits9 himself hartley ever discusses civil -- hardly ever discusses civil war and dismisses civil war -- along with war itself, in fact -- as atavistic, anti-modern in contrast to revolution, the characteristic, modern form of politics in her view. in the words of georgia -- [inaudible] there exists today both a theory of war and an ironnology, a theory of peace. but there is no theory of civil war. i think our own age demands an

unblinking encounter with civil war, and if theory cannot help, then perhaps for the moment history can. of -- so my book, history wars, is a long history of beginnings in republican rome all the way up to the present in the middle east and south asia. over 2,000 years, as it were, from rome to syria in the present. the book is not meant to be a complete history or even a comprehensive intellectual history of civil wars, a truly all-encompassing work in multiple volumes written by many hands collecting accounts of every conflict in world history that people thought at the time or subsequently to civil war is certainly unimaginable. such a book would be repetitive and depressing. i tried to do something much more succinct and to get to the point about what i think are the important features of civil war

over the last 2,000 years. other histories of civil war beyond mine can, and i believe, should be written. be my little -- my little book represents the first attempt to portray its metamorphosis over two millennia, first in the mediterranean context, then in the western tradition, which has gone global especially through the organs of international governance, international law, the united nations, the red cross, for instance. so my goal in the book is to point out the significance of civil war in forming the ways that we think about the world. i argue that despite its destructiveness, civil war has nonetheless been throughout history conceptually generative. without the challenges civil war has posed, our conceptions of politics, authority, revolution, international law, cosmopolitanism, humanitarianism and globalization to name just a few would, i argue, have been poorer. the experience of civil war, the efforts to understand it, to ameliorate it, even ultimately

to prevent it continue to inform our ideas of community, authority and sovereignty to this day. more than any other form of conflict, i argue, civil wars spring from deep and deadly divisions, but they also expose identities and commonalities. to call a war civil is, in fact, to acknowledge the familiarity, even the inti has city of the enemies who one is fighting as members of the same community. not foreigners, but fellow citizens. civil war has something atrocious about it, remarked the german political theorist karl schmidt. it is conducted within a common political unit and because both warring sides at the same time absolutely affirm and absolutely deny this common unit, and i think that gets at the heart of one of our basic sourceses of horror about civil wars. we should not underestimate the force they have, the effect they have in forcing a recognition of commonality amid confrontation,

of familiarity amid enmity, indeed, making us see ourselves in the mirror of that enmity. now, civil wars, i argue, have been so paradoxically fertile in part because there's never been a time -- and nell has already hinted at this -- when that definition was settled to everyone's satisfaction or when term could be used without question or contention in relation to particular conflicts. this, i argue, is in part because civil war has been disputed and debated within so many different historical contexts and so many different historical languages. naming is always a form of framing, especially in relation to wars. the application of the term civil war may fend upon where -- may depend upon whether you are a ruler, a rebel, an established government or an interested outside party. the battle over the names of these conflicts continue long after they have ceased. just to take one contemporary example, using the term civil war to describe the struggle

between the italian resistance and the fascist government during world war ii remains controversial to this day in italy because of the seeming equivalence it implies between the two sides in that struggle. so one key question of the book is how do we tell civil wars apart from other kind of wars? when now, as we can see in syria, afghanistan, iraq and many other similar conflicts, when so many of these allegedly internal conflicts spill over their countries' borders or draw incompetence from outside has happened in liberia and rwanda in the 1990s. can such wars even be considered civil in the traditional sense of taking place among fellow members within a single community when, for example, insurgent groups comprise transnational elements like al-qaeda or isis, for instance, or are -- or they deliberately set themselves against the existing world order of states

by plo claiming their wish -- proclaiming their wish to -- [inaudible] is every civil war really a specimen of the same spee access when ethnic con flickses, wars of cessation, battles for secession can be found across history and around the world under the name civil war and when local context may make it impossible to analyze particular incidents of violence as parts of larger patterns of collective action. what, in short, is a civil war? this is a question i dodge repeatedly in the book and will continue to dodge in the question time. [laughter] i just want to put on the table now i'm not attempting to produce a new and better definition of civil war, i'm trying to tell all those who have tried over many centuries to produce such a new and better definition that everything they have done was ideological and utterly politicized and, therefore, fallacious, and that's giving away a large part of the argument of the book. so my argument as a historian, it's all very complicated. [laughter]

is that any complex idea like civil war has multiple tasks. historians can show the paths not taken along those paths, along those histories as well as the many and winding roads by which we come to our present understandings. one fashionable term of art for this procedure is an intellectual genealogy. i call my own version of it, and this is the subtitle of the book, a history in ideas. to distinguish it from the long-established strain of intellectual history known as the history of ideas. this latter, the history of ideas, reconstructed the biographies of big conceptions; nature, romanticism, the great chain of being across the ages as if those ideas themselves were somehow alive and had an existence independent of those who deployed them. only recently partly in reaction to that, that movement and the critiques of it, only recently have intellectual historians regained courage to construct more subtle and complex histories and ideas over broader periods of notions like

happiness and genius, toleration and common common sense, soverey and democracy. the author of the book on democracy is right here. launched his book at this very podium just a few months ago. .. a maid to pin down the meaning of the civil war and the legal vocabulary and effort made in

the conflict we now know at the american civil war of 1861 to 65 and at the pivotal moment came during the cold war when social scientists but also increasingly the developed economies and others decided to define the term civil war to help them analyze the numerous conflicts going on around the world during the era of the proxy war and decolonization beginning in the 1960s. our confusion now in the 21st century about the meaning of the application of the civil war to the contemporary conflict are i argued the product of concepts on and contrasting histories in the language still speaking of that we don't know where they came from and part of the effort to separate the mouth to show where they came from and how they interact in one concrete example of that in just a moment to illustrate the procedure. with the help of this kind of history i argue can we

understand why the meanings and applications of the civil war remain so controversial like the present. to tell my story, i've broken the book into three parts. each of two chapters. roads from rome i is the is a fe across roads is the second part, past and present is the third. the third part is changing the conception of the civil war chronologically from the first century to the fifth century roughly from cicero to saint augustine. durinduring this year ago i argt shaped arguments about civil war about it legal conception to distinguish it from other kinds of conflict. the genesis of civil war about the likelihood of its recurrence historically. it'if not i argue back from whee

the civil war and the western tradition is located. i argue in the book and i could talk about the same questions that the greeks did not have an equivalent term for the civil war in the way the romans did and they were very self-conscious about the fact that they've not only suffered a new kind of conflict but they needed a new vocabulary distinct from the one they inherited to describe a new kind of conflict so that begins in rome. the civil war they argue was not a fact of nature waiting to be discovered, it was the culture that had to be invented and they were the romans in the first century. the people to understand that has been civil and they were the romans in the period. this is because they understood that conflict and definitely political terms that is the key from the latin term and for

which we get civil civility civilization and all of those conflicts. these were also conflicts which rose to the level of the war all organized, formal, much more destructive than the other kind of. it was deliberately paradoxical even oxymoronic because according to the definitions of a just war as any kind of war for just cause was therefore unjust and fought against those that were not members of the same community. so when it was first invented it could not be a war for the enemies.

so they adopted the war reluctantly and used it only with trepidation. they write their own account of the civi civil war but never usd that term in the title but it was later given and doesn't use it in his own text. bringing himself to speak as it was for julius caesar with the conflict they dare not speak. they thought the civil war would've become a poisoned legacy and it still takes the imagination to record wide civil wareport why thecivil war was sd named with fear for the romans. at the heart of that is what they subversion of the civilization itself. it was a civilized peaceful military far away with enemies far away for what happens in the

civil war the pieces are broken at the conflict comes to the city itself as an incursion into the heart of civility and civilization itself. paradoxically over time they developed the idea to deliver a tight relationship between civil war and the civilization only the civilized romans seem to argue could suffer civil war disorganized or barbarian peoples never cut conflicts that rose to that level of civility so that is another important paradox that designates down centuries. in their histories and also in their poetry as well create narratives in a civilization, the roman civilization prone to the civil war and even cursed by its and would last a century and understand the modern europe and beyond. as i show in the second part of the book, the narratives and

explanations provided a repertoire in europe between the 16th and 18th century that dreww their own conceptions of the civil war. since the enlightenment, the civil war on the one hand and revolution on the other had been in conflict also a genetic relationship. we don't call that conflict the american civil war anymore. that is the first instance of that rebranding that was engaged in the civil war. they are all engaged in the civil war.

the third part of the book is from the u.s. civil war down to our own time. i argue that the greatest contribution to the civil war dead tend to bring it under the domain of the wall for the first time beginning with the modern codification. it is right in the middle of that conflict. at the story i carried down to the convention after the second world war even though the original convention is also in the 1860s had been moderately excluded civil war from that. it remains a task from the international community down to our own moment. the tension in the humanitarian

law and the subject of the latter part of the book and here i traced this as global across the course of the century as the boundaries of the communities within which the civil war can take place so you could expand these two ideas of the asian civil war and ultimately in our own century sometimes it is used to the fact that all are now civil wars that have gone global in that sense but also sometimes used to describe transnational terrorism onto a global scale and i traced the geniality of that language. before i draw a couple conclusions to this which i will be happy to elaborate in the questions i want to bring one recent example of some of the conventions over the meaning and application of civil war to give a concrete us to this.

many of you may remember this is the bloodiest moment in the seconsecond gulf war at that pot only 3,000 people a month were dying in iraq after the us-led invasion and it was a highly political debate at that point on both sides of the atlantic and other parts of the world about what to call the violence in iraq. was it terrorism or insurgency or as some commentators said the civil war for those that said it was not in others who said that it was and at the moment we begin to be interested in the political history of the idea of a civil war or ideas of the civicivilwar because the debated with my reading was having tremendous troll in 182, 63 to define the context.

so i was doing my research at the same time i was listening to the radio with another battle going on simultaneously in real-time about whether there was or was not a civil war in iraq and i thought those were two things that are probably connected and maybe cast they g history it would be my job to tell that later. do not try to do this at home. in the period there were many commentators who said that it was a civil war that the secretary-general said when we have strife in lebanon and other places we call that a civil war and what is happening in iraq is much worse. at the time, the minister of turkey was asked another question and said more poignantly they kill each other just because they belong to different sectors and in iraq

this is a civil war but i cannot make any definition of it. in september of 2006, the stanford political scientist thad no doubt as he put it to rate killing iraq puts it in the company of many recent conflicts but a few hesitat if you hesital civil war for example in guatemala, peru or columbia. at the same moment the british military commentators and about commentator offered a similar accounts of what was going on but their definition was a very complicated one. they ran through the conflict in iraq and world history and said there are only five since 1500. the russian civil war, the

spanish in iraq. this demonstrates the way that it became both politicized and also deployed in the long-range histories of the civil war but it's also about the definition that we might say is a classic example of garbage in and garbage out. use one definition and you get a times 46 in iraq. hput in another definition and its since 1500. i got interested in where the definitions were coming from and why people were deploying them this way and for what reasons were they differ in their insurgency rebellion in those cases. with a debate like that a philosopher, political scientist might find i find only conceptul confusion in such a language in the term civithe term civil ware historians we wanted to find out

where did this complexity come from and what is the back story behind the disputes. it is sent to com isn't to comea better definition that would clear up the disputes on which all the sides would agree that where they came from and how they arose from those that lived in the civil war or that attempted to understand it in the present. so let me draw a couple of things from this story than open up questions. i believe the long view that i've tol told him told in the bd encourage humility, complexity and hope. their centuries even millennia ago social scientists and the civil war lasted longer and leave deeper wounds than any other kind of conflict.

the romans discovered all of that during their own civil war in the first century and afterwards. that is the humility that the treasured discoveries have been repeatedly rediscovered through timtime by those that suffer and those that reflected upon it. opera struggles oveopera struggg and significance arise from multiple histories and languages that collide in the present. controversy that is the meaning of the civil war in iraq and more recently the experiences of a civil war among the local populations and against expert understandings by the members of the red cross and officials of the un for instance creating fees debates of what was or was not a civil war. they need to be excavated if we are to begin to understand why

these conflicts occur. a little bit of hope perhaps. it shows the civil war is not the curse of humanity that some have argued over the last 2,000 years but it is all the way up to the contemporary theorists to say the civil war and part of the human nature as long as people organizing the communities so i want to argue against that with a more historical view. it does right now seem to be declining.

it's what they had first invented over 2000 years ago and we get to that point of an invention we need history in a long view of it. thank you for your attention. [applause] we have 25 minutes for questions and because this is being recorded if you could wait until the microphone reaches you before asking questions this is being recorded for posterity. >> i wonder if you can speak a little more about international

involvement. it is to retain its colonial empire and then an american effort to succeed which i said this is not a false choice. in other words, the international involvement is critical and yet, i am comfortable calling it a conflict of civil war in fact there is a healthy debate about the civil war but can you speak to generalize as we often do about international actors in effect. >> the context is the

decolonization and one of the patents especially in 1945 that tightens the relationship between the struggles of independence and the social independence and then the civil war. that's something i think political scientists have examined and i would take that back into the 18th century when we think that th the conflicts coming out of the entirety of the spanish-american for instance did a very rapid secession of the civil war emerging from that. i think that it's an interesting anomaly not entirely out of the picture. it is succeeded by the civil war into text 19 years in the u.s. case. so i think the empire is an important context in the

international sense we have to talk about the entire to think about the roots of the civil war but also the civil war within the empire and the definition of the conflict according to the view. it is with a little a little men between. so there are shifts that are important but the bigger question is about what the political scientists would call the international civil war that is the majority of the civil war being fought here and now in the world. there's the international conflict since the invasion or they trawl the regional neighbors some like rwanda or

they overspill through the refugee flow and the international terrorist organizations they mention as well. so all bow our internationalized in different dimensions and different parties being drawn in. it's hard to imagine in our contemporary world iceland not immediately contiguous to one another that might have a civil war for a few days or would become internationalized but it is basically an international war. they have a similar sense of the civil war but they are also against our allies. so they overthrow each other and it is particularly

characteristic of the 21st century. >> i wonder if you can talk a little bit about the significance of the states and sovereignty for the idea of the civil war and how actors for whom things like the nation or religion or environment have a primary influence. the work is the kind of transnational community to participatthatparticipates fromt sides for example or the 1866 austrian war which was called the brothers war and i would also imagine that environmentalists today with talk about the humanities

problematic relationships and perhaps in terms of support. >> or indeed revolution will in these arguments we should be talking about that are more on the climate change but a revolution to transform our habits as a species to ameliorate the climate change in the large-scale language of the transformation. there is no necessary relationship in the statehood sovereignty. many of our colleagues and friends have written about how the terms common to be rigged together and then start to come apart for recently as well and so for that reason there is a necessarit is anecessary connece statehood or the territoriality or civil war. there was almost an idea but a

foundation to it as well but that began to expand to the entire mediterranean world becomes territorial since the beginning of the idea of the civil war and what is crucial is the conflict that takes place within a mutually recognized community that can be a transnational community impacts and, and it can be the case that creates the boundaries that were not otherwise evident before the. it defines the commonality of the community on both sides of the atlantic in the arena in

detailthetolls precisely at thei find it again and again and again what i think most interesting about the language is precisely how it defines the boundaries of commonality in the community >> i'm just wondering for peace in the future, do you think it is justifiable to allow them to intervene to some extent or another issue? >> that is one of the most flawed questions that kept coming up in the book for when and whether the use of a civil

war either justifies intervention or has the exact opposite effect that in some cases it is effectively to see if it's somebody else's business and has to burn itself out in the community and i think some is used in iraq and the second war for the ethnic conflict and it's not something we should get involved in with others like syria or the international conflict to use the term that gives belligerent status to those that are formerly called rebels by the district authority and opens up the possibility of the humanitarian aid and military aid so that it can work in different directions. should we always allow

intervention in the hope that it might create perpetual peace but maybe you have another idea in mind. >> who gets to decide the criteria? we see the war within the state and define it as a civil war but often it is th is the case in al unit it is an imposition may be a colonial imposition. they don't recognize themselves belonging to the unit and a reject so by way of putting this gets to define whether the

warriors decide what is their own war and then the second part is conceptual regarding how important you see the political unit in the state which is a fairly recent state affair phenomena in this long-term history. one of the conclusions i draw in the book is we need a dialogue of those two assets were from the outside with the authority or the humanitarian lawyer for instance with those that have the ability to deny the term to secure conflicts and those fighting on the ground for example i use the book in 2011 and 2012 we had at least six months of testimony from people within saying either in english

or arabic we are offering a civil war here. it's to determine formally if they international conflict that triggered the application of the various parts of the convention and triggered the possibility of the humanitarian aid so all kinds of consequences flow from that so i'm interested in that gap of the understandings of the ground and external expert into that. there's the external authorities to make that determination important. the statehood we could be here all night if we went through that. i argued elsewhere in the other

books it is a very modern invention. it is not just of the states erupting in the domestic circumstances but it is the state among the states, mutually recognized defining their authority and territory. it's especially in the postcolonial context that begins in the american revolution and goes through the spanish century to the 1970s and beyond and it is often out of the secession from empire and that is a very important part of the process in the course they take place in the pre-existing communities may be empires or federation.

his defenses of the integrity of the union during the u.s. civil war because has modern statehood at direct power than any other individual in that context but in the conflict he calls most of the time a rebellion rather than a civil war. i've been asserting the legitimate authority over the population. hayes is the classic voice of the modern statehood and that is a good place to start to ask a. >> in the mid-70s a book came out cold consensus conflict and

american historians. the purpose is different than yours. it was to talk about how the passing of the consensus generation and the development of the conflict almost came. but as you were talking, it strikes me that. are we doomed to have stability? >> i wish that i shared your confidence that it wa there wase root of the civil war request. this is something i did not touch on and talk since you asked and others have been asking recently, my editor originally said the books would

be published in november. my editor said let's leave if we don't want to get caught up and now it's become tremendously timely. one thing i noticed this comes back to two the ranting about the language in the civil war and the contemporary politics not just in the u.s. but in france. it does indicate something about the way in which if we think of politics as the management of the fundamental and irreducible difference became we begin to see that. it is the increasingly vital and

language to come back to the term increasing incivility. it is in the name of stability when she was trying to quote the letter about jeff sessions. it is a great sign up at the breakdown of civility and it can be weaponize as a means of closing down the discussion on such an important and stressful moment and that was. >> one more question to create balance i would like to hear a female voice if that is possible.

>> i've noticed the story is mentioned a few times is meant for the origin of the civil war syndrome and i would like to know how could people possibly create such a story in which the establishment of the country is based on the asked and the fact it's not only made up by the people ipeople and passed throue generation to tell about how people see more. >> what makes you think it was made up? [laughter] >> it is a very good point. one answer is they had such a story of the battling between brothers because almost everyone else thinks about the hebrew bible and the primal conflict

within the family often in the metaphor of the battle between brothers. i think what is interesting also they tell although the story had been around a couple of centuries before it is during and after the civil war so almost the other way around. but that particular myth becomes more potent and i think it does tell us something about that idea that the city itself was cursed by a civil war and this is something primal that went back to the origins and it's something that couldn't be shaken off and therefore was in

the genealogy itself so that is a very significant myth that is not unique as can be seen in many others around the world as well. thank you so much. >> we are going to move the podium aside and began to line will form down the middle road here. thank you so much.