The civil sphere in war and peace: From Athens to Kyiv

Abstract

This essay explores the tragic paradox that haunts ‘actually existing’ civil spheres. The civil sphere represents history's most creative and ambitious effort to replace violence with peaceful comity and domination with democracy. Yet, the very effort to define a space of nonviolent democracy is based on a binary discourse: the motives, relations, and institutions of civil spheres can be defined only in relation to antagonistic anti-civil qualities that encourage violence and oppression. Caught inside this paradox, members of the civil sphere experience their civil communities as fragile, as continuously threatened by putatively anti-civil forces outside them. It is for this reason that actually existing civil spheres have so frequently encouraged violent wars against city states, nations, and empires outside their boundaries and repression against excluded insiders as well. After laying these contradictions out conceptually, they are explored empirically via an interpretation of The Oresteia, Aeschylus’ tragic drama that cut to the heart of Athenian democracy. After this aesthetic investigation, the essay turns to the regional and global wars of the last 100 years, examining how the debilitating national boundaries of civil spheres have, not only allowed, but encouraged destructive paroxysms of violence right up to the present day.