Watch the full video (above) of the public lecture by David Armitage where he discusses the subject of his new book, ‘Civil Wars: A History in Ideas’. A well-respected historian, he is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History and former Chair of the Department of History at Harvard University,

Armitage begins the lecture, discussing how our age has normatively been referred to as ‘a long peace’ in terms of inter-state conflict, describing the 70 years since World War II, where we are said to have allegedly ‘won the war on war’ for the time-being.

He goes on to cite examples from the last few years of about 40 armed conflicts from Afghanistan to Yemen, excluding individual acts of terrorism, insurgency, and other forms of asymmetrical warfare, and talks about how, in the midst of this fragile ‘peace’, we are actually still at war.