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On the Civil-ness of Civil War: A Comment on David Armitage's Civil War Time
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2018
Extract
It is a pleasure and an honor to comment on the work of David Armitage, a historian of unparalleled reach and impact. His topic could not be more important. “Civil war has gradually become the most widespread, the most destructive, and the most characteristic form of organized human violence,” he writes in his elegant and masterful recent book Civil Wars: A History in Ideas. Examining the history of the idea of “civil war” is not simply an academic enterprise. Understanding its history, he explains, “reveals the contingency of the phenomenon, contradicting those who claim its permanence and durability.” Armitage's purpose is “to show that what humans have invented, they may yet dismantle … what intellectual will has enshrined, an equal effort of imaginative determination can dethrone.”
- Type
- Nineteenth Annual Grotius Lecture
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © by The American Society of International Law 2018
References
1 David Armitage, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas 5 (2017).
2 Id. at 11.
3 Id.
4 See David Armitage's lecture, supra.
5 See Mary L. Dudziak, War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences 11 (2012) (discussing the idea that wartime is a “state of exception” where time is suspended and “rule of law … bends in favor of the security of the state”).
6 See David Armitage's lecture, supra (noting that civil wars were not “valued” under international law until after World War II when the Geneva Conventions were revised in 1949).
7 Id. (discussing how the three-hundred-year span from 1648 to 1945 was dominated by interstate wars, but after 1989 intrastate civil wars became the most prevalent form of war).
8 Armitage, supra note 1, at 3–4 (recalling the post–World War II period characterized by enduring peace in Europe, North America, and wealthy countries such as Australia and Japan).
9 See George Orwell, You and the Atomic Bomb, in Fifty Orwell Essays (2003) (ebook), at http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part33 (contemplating the idea that powerful nations might tacitly agree to refrain from using atomic bombs against one another).
10 Id.
11 See, e.g., William H. Rehnquist, All the Laws But One: Civil Liberties in Wartime 3–26 (1998) (discussing civil liberties in wartime and focusing most chapters on the example of the Civil War).
12 See, e.g., Dudziak, Mary L., Toward a Geopolitics of the History of International Law in the Supreme Court, 105 ASIL Proc. 532 (2011)Google Scholar (noting the great overrepresentation of references to the Civil War, compared to very few references to the Cold War, in International Law in the U.S. Supreme Court: Continuity and Change (David L. Sloss, Michael D. Ramsey & William S. Dodge eds., 2011)). But see Stephen M. Griffin, Long Wars and the Constitution (2013) (detailing the impact of the Cold War on presidential war power).
13 Armitage, supra note 1, at 12.
14 Id.
15 See Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863–1877 11–34 (1988) (noting that the American Civil War redrew the economic and political map of both the North and South and accelerated the industrialization of the North).
16 See Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War xiii (2008) (asserting that the United States was transformed by the American Civil War as sacrifice and military struggle came to define the nation and its purpose).
17 Id. at xv–xvi (arguing that the American Civil War created a “republic of shared suffering” in which people in both the North and the South had experienced sacrifice and loss). On the limits of postwar reconciliation, see Caroline E. Janney, Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (2013).
18 See generally id. at 211–49 (highlighting the nation's response to the loss, including calls for society to not let the war-time deaths pass in vain, and to repay the sacrifices of soldiers, be it collecting and burying bodies or caring for the injured and survivors).
19 See id. at 61–136 (describing how the sheer scale of the death tolls after battles in the American Civil War defied administrative predictions and capacity); see also David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory 68 (2003) (noting the difficulty of interring the American Civil War's dead and specifically discussing how only one-third of the Union dead were interred in identifiable graves after the Battle of Appomattox).
20 See Faust, supra note 16, at xiii–xiv; see also Frederick Law Olmsted, Hospital Transports 115 (1863) (describing the scene of wounded soldiers as a “republic of suffering”).
21 See Olmsted, supra note 20, at 115–18 (describing the community among the wounded and dying soldiers on his hospital boat).
22 See Faust, supra note 16, at xii–xiv (highlighting how the American Civil War impacted national policy, such as the establishment of national cemeteries and pensions, and created a sense of union and community through shared sacrifice); see also Blight, supra note 19, at 18 (citing Frederick Douglass's argument that the American Civil War would reorganize the country and bring about “national regeneration”); Mark S. Schantz, Awaiting the Heavenly Country: Civil War and the Culture of Death 61–63 (2008) (illustrating how the American Civil War was the first in American history where many young men died far from home, and it resulted in a growing national belief in restoration, both bodily and communally, in heaven).
23 See Thomas W. Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains 1–27 (2015) (arguing that the dead do cultural work for the living).
24 See Abraham Lincoln, U.S. President, Gettysburg Address (Nov. 19, 1863) (urging that the living must carry out the unfinished work of the dead, ensuring that the nation “shall have a new birth of freedom”); see also Mary L. Dudziak, Death and the War Power, Yale J.L. & Human (forthcoming 2018) (developing further the idea of the political work of the dead).
25 See Armitage, supra note 1, at 183 (stating that the Lieber Code was the first attempt to codify the laws of war).
26 John Fabian Witt, Lincoln's Code: The Laws of War in American History 1–4 (2012) (noting that the Lieber Code endorsed Emancipation in addition to setting out rules for the treatment of enemy soldiers).
27 See Armitage, supra note 1, at 163 (arguing that Lieber's conception of civil war was inapplicable to the conflict at hand, the American Civil War).
28 Witt, supra note 26, at 4.
29 See Helen Kinsella, The Image Before the Weapon: A Critical History of the Distinction Between Combatant and Civilian, 82–83 (2011) (explaining that there were mutually agreed limits on violence when it came to civilians during the Civil War, but that such limits were not applied during the U.S.-Indian wars).
30 Foner, supra note 15, at 590 (explaining that the most obvious fracture of the post–Civil War polity was the continuing subjugation and disenfranchisement of African Americans); Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History 299 (1997).
31 See generally Peter Cozzens, The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West (2016) (emphasizing the brutality of American forces in the Indian Wars).
32 Kinsella, supra note 29, at 96–97 (“The polyvalent dimensions of civilization invoked—of civilized to savage, of civilized warfare against the warfare of savages, and of civilized men against savages—censured the military while simultaneously upholding the differences between civilized Christian men and the savages they desired to mutilate.”).
33 Id. at 97–99.
34 Id. at 98.
35 Id. at 99.
36 Id. at 101–02.
37 Id. at 96–97.
38 Id., supra note 29, at 97.
39 See id. at 82; see also Clara Altman, Courtroom Colonialism: Philippine Law and U.S. Rule, 1898–1935 87 (Aug. 2014) (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Brandeis University) (detailing the way protections of the law of war were not extended to Filipinos thought of as “savages”).
40 Kinsella, supra note 29, at 99.
41 Id. at 99–101.
42 See Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek 31 (2013).
43 Kinsella, supra note 29, at 99–101.
44 See Kelman, supra note 42, at 93–98.
45 Id.
46 Faust, supra note 16 (discussing a “republic of suffering” among Northerners and Southerners, but not discussing Native American deaths).
47 See generally Dudziak, supra note 24 (examining the impact of physical distance on American war politics).
48 See John Tirman, The Deaths of Others: The Face of Civilians in America's Wars 3–5 (2012); Yuki Tanaka, Introduction, in Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth-Century History 4–7 (Yuki Tanaka & Marilyn B. Young eds., 2009).
49 See Nasser Hussain, The Sound of Terror: Phenomenology of a Drone Strike, Boston Review, October 16, 2013, available at http://bostonreview.net/world/hussain-drone-phenomenology; Scott Shane, Objective Troy: A Terrorist, a President, and the Rise of the Drone 6 (2015); Under the Drones: Modern Lives in the Afghanistan-Pakistan Borderlands 6 (Shahzad Bashir & Robert D. Crews eds., 2012) (discussing the regions affected by drone warfare).
50 See Andrew Bacevich, Introduction, in The Long War: A New History of U.S. National Security Policy Since World War II 4 (Bacevich ed., 2007); Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything (2016) (discussing ongoing U.S. armed conflict); Young, Marilyn B., “I Was Thinking, as I Often Do These Days, of War”: The United States in the Twenty-First Century, 36 Diplomatic Hist. 1 (2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar (noting the way U.S. war is continuous and comes to be normalized).
51 Mary L. Dudziak, War and Peace in Time and Space, 13 Seattle J. Soc. Just. 381 (2015) (arguing that the persistence of conflicts means that the experience of "peace" depends on class, race, and location).
52 See Pew Research Center, The Military Civilian Gap: Fewer Family Connections, Pew Social Trends (Nov. 23, 2011), at http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/11/23/the-military-civilian-gap-fewer-family-connections/#fnref-9923-1.
53 See Rick Gladstone, Report Confirms That Chemical Arms Were Used on Syrian Villagers, N.Y. Times (June 29, 2017), available at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/29/world/middleeast/syria-sarin-chemical-weapons-united-nations.html (noting worldwide revulsion to images of dead Syrian children); see also Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others 14–17 (2003) (discussing the experience of viewing photographs of catastrophes).
54 Armitage, supra note 1, at 166.
55 See Paul A. Kramer, Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (2006) (describing the brutal U.S. war against Philippine independence fighters).
56 Dudziak, supra note 5, at 28.