1 - Stasis
Summary
It is generally acknowledged that a theory of civil war is completely lacking today, yet this absence does not seem to concern jurists and political scientists too much. Roman Schnur, who formulated this diagnosis as early as the 1980s, nonetheless added that the disregard of civil war went hand in hand with the advance of global civil war (Schnur 1983, 121, 156). At thirty years’ distance, this observation has lost none of its topicality: while the very possibility of distinguishing a war between States and an internecine war appears today to have disappeared, specialists continue to carefully avoid any hint at a theory of civil war. It is true that in recent years, owing to the upsurge of wars impossible to define as international, publications concerning so-called ‘internal wars’ have multiplied (above all, in the United States); even in these instances, however, the analysis was geared not toward an interpretation of the phenomenon, but – in accordance with a practice ever more widespread – toward the conditions under which an international intervention becomes possible. The paradigm of consensus, which today dominates both political action and theory, seems incompatible with the serious investigation of a phenomenon that is at least as old as Western democracy.
ℵ There exists, today, both a ‘polemology’, a theory of war, and an ‘irenology’, a theory of peace, but there is no ‘stasiology’, no theory of civil war. We have already mentioned how, according to Schnur, this absence could be related to the advance of global civil war. The concept of ‘global civil war’ was introduced contemporaneously in 1963 in Hannah Arendt's book On Revolution (in which the Second World War was defined as ‘a kind of civil war raging all over the earth’ [Arendt 1963, 8]) and in Carl Schmitt's Theorie des Partisanen (Schmitt 2007), a book dedicated to the figure that marks the end of the conception of war of the Jus publicum Europaeum, which was grounded on the possibility of clearly distinguishing between war and peace, soldiers and civilians, enemies and criminals. Whatever date one wishes to trace this end back to, it is certain that today the state of war in the traditional sense has virtually disappeared.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- StasisThe Civil War as a Paradigm, pp. 1 - 18Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2015