JAN 16

CPR is pleased to invite you to a Public Lecture on  Civil Wars: A History in Ideas Monday, 16 January 2017, 3:00 - 5:00 p.m.

Speaker: David Armitage Chair: Pratap Bhanu Mehta

Multipurpose Hall, Kamladevi Complex, India International Centre

 

Image: Book Cover

 

For much of recorded history, the most frequent, horrific, destructive and yet strangely overshadowed form of collective human violence has been civil war. It has shattered communities and scarred imaginations as much as it has shaped nations and staged pivotal moments in world history. Nor has such carnage been confined to the distant past: in the last fifty years almost half the world's countries, especially its poorest, have suffered civil war, with their impact being estimated at about $100 billion per annum, or roughly twice what is spent annually on aid to developing countries. Civil war is also big business. Economists, political scientists, aid agencies, development strategists and governments put major resources into examining the factors that cause civil war, what determines its intensity and duration, how civil wars end, and why they seem so often to recur. In other words it is a global scourge and one that shows no signs of disappearing any time soon. David Armitage is one of the most distinguished historians of our time. Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History and former Chair of the Department of History at Harvard University, where he teaches intellectual history and international history. He is also an Affiliated Professor in the Harvard Department of Government, an Affiliated Faculty Member at Harvard Law School, an Honorary Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge, and an Honorary Professor of History at the University of Sydney. David Armitage is the author or editor of sixteen books, among them The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (2000), which won the Longman/History Today Book of the Year Award, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (2007), which was chosen as a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year, Foundations of Modern International Thought (2013) and The History Manifesto (co-auth., 2014), a New Statesman Book of the Year. His latest book, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas, will appear in early 2017. Please join us for tea at 2.30 p.m. RSVP at president.cpr@cprindia.org