Stasis and Civil War

This excerpt from Ninon Grangé's The Forgetting of Stasis and the End of Civil War reclaims the concept of stasis as understood by the ancient Greeks for contemporary thought. Grangé argues that stasis has been forgotten in favour of bellum civile or ‘civil war’. However, ‘civil war’ has none of the nuance of stasis, and limits our understanding of conflict to a ‘dual model’, where two independent entities are at war with one another. The internal conflict that takes place within a city-state cannot be understood according to the model of war with foreign entities. Instead, it involves the intestinal destruction of the city from within. Stasis captures the paradoxical nature of this kind of war, in which there can be no real victor. In the sections included here, Grangé gives an account of the ontological and political dimensions of stasis in Thucydides, Heraclitus, and Democritus. Ultimately, reclaiming stasis comes at the price of admitting a fundamental link between politics and violence. However, stasis allows us to understand not only ‘civil war’ better, but also the very essence of war itself, and is an invaluable resource for present-day political considerations.