Disarmament under International Law by John Kierulf
| Published date | 01 March 2018 |
| Date | 01 March 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020702018765078 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Armitage is at his most authoritative and illuminating when discussing the
related concepts of civil war and revolution. Although the latter is usually asso-
ciated with ‘‘high ideals and transformative hopes,’’ and the former with ‘‘base
motives and senseless violence’’ (121), he reminds us that some of the most import-
ant events of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have attracted both labels.
Edmund Burke depicted the French Revolution as a civil war in which two warring
sides claimed sovereignty—one in the name of the king and the other on behalf of
the people. In arguing that Britain should intervene on the side of the monarchy, he
also launched a debate about the legitimacy of internationalizing civil war. Even
that great foundational moment for the United States of America, the American
Revolution, has been reconsidered by contemporary historians as a civil war. While
the ‘‘War of Independence’’ has been portrayed as cohesive rather than divisive in
the popular mythology, the conflict in fact split ‘‘domestic kindred’’ (136)—com-
munities and families—into opposing Patriots and Loyalists. At the height of the
fighting, Armitage notes, the proportion of the population of British North
America in arms was comparable to those fighting in the later American Civil
War (137).
Social scientists who love to define and aggregate phenomena will not find a
clear answer in this book as to what constitutes a civil war. But Armitage leaves
this task to others. His job, he tells us, is not to find a definition ‘‘on which all sides
could agree, but to ask where such competing conceptions came from’’ and what
they have meant (238). But he also offers a tantalizing suggestion that civil war is
contingent, rather than inevitable—‘‘a feature, not a bug, in the software that
makes us human’’ (11). It is a pity that this learned examination provides no
guide on how we might transcend the intimate violence that still divides so many
political communities.
John Kierulf
Disarmament under International Law
Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017. 276 pp. $34.95 (paperback)
ISBN: 978 0 7735 4823 7
Reviewed by: Tariq Rauf (TariqRauf@icloud.com), Global Nuclear Solutions (Vienna, Austria)
Navigating the plethora of international arms control treaties and fora can be a
challenge, both for an experienced diplomat or scholar and for a novice foreign
service officer or undergraduate student. Since the end of the Second World War
and the establishment of the United Nations (UN), a number of multilateral con-
ventions and treaties have been negotiated to control, limit, or prohibit different
types and classes of conventional weapons and weapons of mass destruction.
Publications such as the United Nations Disarmament Yearbook,
1
published
1. https://www.un.org/disarmament/publications/yearbook/volume-40-2015/ (accessed 20 November
2017).
180 International Journal 73(1)
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