From the siege of Phyle, during the winter of 404, until the ascent of the Acropolis in the fall of the following year, several fighting communities had succeeded one another under Thrasybulus’ direction, reconstituting little by little, as if in ripples, the whole of the Athenian community. The city’s mantle – to refer to the Platonic image again – was, however, far from being unified and homogeneous at the end of the civil war. Torn and patched back together, its seams were visible, and the political life of the initial years of the fourth century made them periodically reappear. The memory of these events reflected these struggles: In the aftermath of the civil war, various accounts coexisted and contradicted each other, before being replaced, during the fourth century, by a univocal civic account. There is every reason to believe that Thrasybulus tried, in the aftermath of the democratic restoration in 403, to put the memory of his epic journey on public display. However, just as he did not succeed in imposing himself durably in public life after 403. Thrasybulus lost the battle of history and memory by failing to impose his own account of the events in Athens – and this is most certainly what ultimately explains why he got left out of ancient sources.

Lysias, the son of Cephalus, was an Athenian logographer, a wealthy metic and a staunch democrat: In the Dictionary of Received Ideas about Greek antiquity, the entry devoted to Lysias would probably read along these lines. If there was ever a man identified with a status, a social class, a professional function and a political identity, it is indeed the orator Lysias, whose family, originally from Syracuse, benefits from an exceptional documentary focus. Considering all the available evidence and his path through life as a whole, a completely different image of the man emerges. Outside of the brief context of the civil war, Lysias was never depicted as a metic and never defined himself as such; nothing, moreover, indicates that he particularly suffered from this status or that he sought to be a naturalized Athenian at any price after the failure of his bid for citizenship in 403. Likewise, considering his life as a whole, his attachment to the democratic regime is not as clear to see as his vibrant proclamations in Against Eratosthenes suggest: The company he kept and the choice of his clients plead for a much more nuanced approach. Finally, his conversion to logography also deserves to be put into perspective: Was he not already considered a brilliant ‘sophist,’ albeit not a logographer, before the beginning of the civil war? He certainly continued to be considered as such after the reconciliation. Beyond the din of stasis, which forced everyone to choose their camp and froze individuals in clear-cut positions, Lysias’ life reveals that Athenian society was much more fluid than it appears in terms of status, partisanship or profession. On deeper examination, the life of Lysias seems marked by a form of uncertainty due not only to gaps in the source material, but also to the irreducible complexity of Athenian community life. Around this ill-defined man gravitate shifting choruses whose principles of composition and recomposition can be defined by taking advantage of the exceptional light shone on them by the shock of the civil war.

‘Critias was indeed the most rapacious, the most violent and the most murderous of all those who were part of the oligarchy.’ In the ancient tradition, Critias is a man systematically described in superlatives. The ancient sources readily depict him as an extremist oligarch, a misguided disciple of Socrates, oblivious to the lessons of his former master. Incomparable Critias? This superlative representation deserves to be deconstructed. Not in order to rehabilitate his tarnished memory but because the man is a convenient bogeyman who acts as the singular representative of what was in reality a collective adventure. Not only does his role as leader of the Thirty remain to be proven, but this exclusive focus also tends to obscure the vast chorus that surrounded him: Far from being a lone wolf, Critias was the spokesman or, rather, the coryphaeus of Athenian oligarchs united by common habits and experiences. A poet and a virtuoso musician, Critias even promoted a true choral policy, striving to convince all the Athenians remaining in the city to align to his radical positions. Breaking with the democratic experiment and its multiple and competing choruses, the oligarch sought to create a single, distinctive and hermetic chorus, of which all the members had to dance in unison and where the slightest deviation was mercilessly punished. Better still, in the tumult of the civil war, Critias had a dream: to establish a permanent state of exception in order to forge a new brand of men entirely devoted to the cause of the oligarchy.

In American culture, there is a mix and mismatch of core discourses: religious, Enlightenment, and market economy. Each claims, contributes, and competes for kinds of belonging and national definition, by abstract principles of equality, particular community of religion and nation, and possessive individualism of each one’s own self-interest. Poetry, far from being private reflection or self-referring aesthetic object, is an arena in which each of these discourses encounter each other. Widely circulated in newspapers, magazines, publicly recited, poetry took part in and also refracted, in especially intense and focal ways, the drama, questions, and terms of belonging crucial to, and conflictual in, the unfolding of America. In this chapter, I explore the intercrossing and contention between American discourses of religion, Enlightenment, and individualism in the Abolitionist poetry of Whittier, the poetry of war in Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson, and the poetry of participation in Walt Whitman. In the texts of each, vocabularies, terms, allusion, and critique of American cultural, religious, and political life form complex interchanges, at times through alignment, at times in tense and critical relationship. The poem becomes a field of confrontation, appeal, and address within the context of their writing as voices of culture take on poetic force.

This chapter recounts women’s reactions to the siege and subsequent fall of Fort Sumter and their short-lived hope that it would be the sole conflict that resulted from secession. Their cathartic moment of joy quickly evaporated when soldiers departed for Virginia, leaving them once again in a tormented state of lonely anticipation. Until the events of First Bull Run, men’s letters home expressed a jovial mood. This atmosphere changed drastically when loved ones began to die in combat. Thus, while Fort Sumter may be considered the first shot of the Civil War, it took First Bull Run for South Carolinians to realize the urgency of the conflict and finally, completely, enter the Civil War. The conclusion traces the lives of the elite white women profiled through the Civil War and its aftermath. Many of them earnestly subscribed to the Lost Cause myth after the war, writing rosy memoirs of antebellum days or joining Confederate memorial organizations. That their prewar predictions of doom and destruction do not line up with their postwar remembrances further proves that the Lost Cause mythology is divorced from the reality of the South after the Civil War.

There were practical limits to these political imaginaries and projects. People needed to work, and the war was a source of employment for many displaced people. This chapter explores the parallel systems of governance in Khartoum that southern militia-running businessmen (including Kerubino Kuanyin Bol, Paulino Matip, Abdel Bagi Ayii Akol, and others) organised in Khartoum, including their own prisons, barracks, and offices. Many residents drew on their jobs, sympathetic policing, and ‘traditional’ courts, but these rebel authorities also propagated their own ideas of future structures of political community based on regional zones of ethno-political authority. This is an unrecorded history of militia governance, looking beyond these authorities’ immediate mercenary aims and exploring their leadership’s and members’ own critiques of governance and models of power. This sets a challenge to current studies of rebel governance systems, which rarely examine pro-government proxy militias. It also outlines how the more creative, inclusive, and imaginative intellectual work detailed in this book was undermined (and ultimately buried) by these wartime exigencies and practical (if mercenary) structures of militia work and ethnic self-defence.

Johnson’s political views were complex, partly because they were based on a deeper philosophy of the individual and society. Placed here by divine providence, each person has something to do for the good of others; and legislators, too, can play their part in preserving human relationships from individual malice. Crucially, governments must also keep order, and ward off the possibility of social breakdown – the Civil War was within living memory when Johnson was growing up. Thus he praised hierarchy and state-enforced religious unity, inasmuch as it mean harmony and security. Johnson’s political writings are often combative and bluntly phrased: in his early work as an Opposition journalist, outraged at censorship and creeping tyranny; in his fierce critiques of imperial exploitation and slavery; and in his contempt for the radicals who appealed to ‘liberty’ – a slogan Johnson regarded with some suspicion. In his journey to the Scottish Highlands, meanwhile, Johnson praised traditional authority while showing no nostalgia for feudalism.

Political possibilities closed down as the war ended in 2005. With the negotiation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement and the death of the SPLA’s leader John Garang – which sparked riots and racialised murder across Khartoum – many people’s connections and trust in inclusive intellectual and political projects were broken. This chapter briefly surveys the aftermath of the riots and peace process, which saw a massive movement of well over a million Khartoum residents to the south, where they reconstructed a very different set of neighbourhoods that in the late 2000s were often known as New Khartoums. The secession of South Sudan in 2011 was not a panacea or end goal of the long conflicts for many of these returned Khartoum residents. Reflecting discussions with returning residents over 2012 and 2013, the chapter examines the lost possibilities of the projects they undertook in Khartoum, and the closing space for political projects and democratic communities that they discussed and worked for during the war.

During wartime, the Constitution requires the president to lead the nation as commander-in-chief. But what about first ladies? As wives, mothers, and co-equal partners, these “first ladies-in-chief” have found themselves serving as field companion to the commander-in-chief, mother-in-chief to sons on combat duty, steward of national resources, and caretakers to the nation’s wounded. This chapter considers six prominent first ladies during major American conflicts: Martha Washington and the Revolutionary War, Dolley Madison and the War of 1812, Mary Todd Lincoln and the Civil War, Edith Wilson and World War I, Eleanor Roosevelt and World War II, Lady Bird Johnson and Vietnam, and Barbara and Laura Bush during the first and second Gulf Wars. Taken together, they paint the first lady as a vital contributor to the nation’s military efforts who deserve our recognition and respect.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper work has helped reshape Civil War literary studies and illustrates the field’s larger preoccupations. This chapter centers on “Bury Me in a Free Land,” a poem that demonstrates the craft of a writer uniquely adept at using and subverting expectations in a literature that was highly conventional, thus illustrating for contemporary readers both the patterns and their breach. Harper’s poem speaks to the core preoccupations that scholars have been tracing as they identify an ever-broadening archive of Civil War literature, namely the importance of slavery and abolition, the role of death and suffering in the context of spirituality and sentimentality, the shifting understandings of race and gender, and the exploration of how the conflict would be remembered. Poetry was the period’s predominant genre, and this example points to current scholarly interest in works that are ephemeral, conventional, and written to appeal to a broad popular audience. Instead of asking what great works of literature writers in general and combatants in particular produced, as previous scholars had done, recent inquiries have considered a greater diversity of writers and taken an expansive approach to this large question: What is Civil War literature, and what cultural, social, and political contributions did it make?

The South has never been a real space in the imaginations of authors from colonization-forward. From early works from the colonial era to the wave of Afrofuturist texts of the past several decades, the South has been a space of alternative realities, a site of speculation upon which authors projected imagined presents and futures. The “otherness” of the South has always lent the region a speculative bent in the United States and global imagination. This essay examines literature from the antebellum South itself, the supposedly geographically fixed monolith of plantation culture. Written by a majority white, proslavery authorship, southern imaginative writing before the Civil War always speculated on the “South” and shaped it as a cultural identity. To understand the endurance and widespread influence of the dominant versions of “South,” it is necessary to examine their literary origin point and not just the aftershocks and reverberations. Like writing about the South, writing from the South during the nineteenth century was always a speculative exercise, made especially evident when focusing on works by those invested in continuing an idea of “South” that lay the foundation for ideologies circulating long after the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War.

This chapter analyses how external violence impacts on relationships and social dynamics in Sierra Leone, particularly in urban areas. The civil war (1991–2002) disrupted historical marriage and gender roles, reshaping relationship dynamics. In contemporary Sierra Leone, youth face socio-economic obstacles that alter their path to adulthood. They navigate being stuck in youthhood through favours and debts, challenging conventional expectations like formal employment and marriage while securing their future. Urban settings encourage diverse relationship practices, allowing for more open exploration of desire. However, families still play a significant role in mediating conflicts between partners. Youth, unable to establish formal alliances through marriage, create relationship forms that bridge personal desires, societal expectations, and economic constraints. Understanding these complex relationship dynamics is vital, as violence can arise from the tension between personal aspirations and the demands of committed relationships. In urban Sierra Leone’s complex social landscape, violence, intimacy, and social structures are intricately intertwined.

This chapter applies localized peace enforcement theory to a subnational analysis of patterns of dispute escalation in Mali. In order to investigate whether the previous chapters’ experimental findings generalize to real-world operations, the chapter presents the results of two analyses of UN peacekeeping efforts to prevent the onset of communal violence in the central Malian region of Mopti. The first study leverages a geographic regression discontinuity design to compare dispute escalation on either side of the Burkina Faso–Mali border. The border splits similar areas into those “treated” with UN peacekeeping patrols (on the Mali side) and “control” areas without peacekeeping (on the Burkina Faso side). The findings indicate that peacekeeping reduces the likelihood of communal violence. The second study delves deeper into the data with an analysis of UN peacekeepers from different countries deployed to the same regions of Mali and uncovers further evidence in line with the predictions of the theory. Rather than comparing UN peacekeeping in countries with against those without a peacekeeping operation, the study compares UN peacekeepers from different contributing countries – Togo and Senegal – deployed to the same area.

This chapter examines local-level peacekeeping operations in a cross-national context. The analysis draws on a dataset of nearly 400,000 georeferenced troop deployments in sub-Saharan Africa from 1999 to 2019. Consistent with the theory’s predictions, it demonstrates that increases in the number of peacekeeping troops deployed to local communities are strongly positively associated with decreases in the onset of communal violence. Since cross-national data of this sort cannot directly measure local perceptions of peacekeepers cross-nationally, the study tallies the number of peacekeepers from former colonial powers and neighboring countries deployed to each area as a proxy for perceptions of bias. The patterns further vary in ways that support the logic of localized peace enforcement theory. Specifically, the evidence shows that there is no relationship between the deployment of these two types of peacekeepers and levels of communal violence. The analyses presented in the chapter also detect a strong negative association between all other types of peacekeepers, likely to be perceived as impartial, and the onset of communal violence.

This chapter describes the importance of studying wartime displacement, outlines several key questions that motivate the book, and summarizes the main arguments. It also briefly defines strategic wartime displacement and specifies the scope of the study, explaining why it confines the analysis to civil wars and why it focuses on displacement perpetuated by state combatants. It then describes what we know about displacement in war. This includes outlining existing explanations and discussing their limitations. It concludes by describing the methods and sources used in the book, summarizing its main findings, and outlining the structure of the rest of the book.

This chapter provides additional evidence for the sorting theory in a broader set of contexts. In order to demonstrate that the findings from Chapter 5 generalize beyond Uganda – and can account for the empirical associations found in Chapter 4 – it conducts “shadow” case studies of three civil wars from the Strategic Displacement in Civil Conflict dataset that experienced forced relocation. The three case studies are Burundian Civil War (1991–2005), the Aceh conflict in Indonesia (1999–2005), and the Vietnam War (1960–1975). These cases were selected for both methodological and practical reasons. Using process-tracing of secondary sources, the chapter finds that in all three cases, perpetrators used forced relocation to overcome identification problems posed by guerrilla insurgencies, specifically by drawing inferences about the identities and allegiances of the local population based on civilian flight patterns and physical locations. State authorities also used relocation to extract economic and military resources, notably recruits, from the displaced, which in some instances helped fill critical resource gaps. The evidence suggests that the theory and its underlying mechanisms are generalizable beyond Uganda and travel to other diverse contexts.