This post contains a link to the book called The Savage Peace: An Essay on Civil War and the Amnesia of Democracy, the entirety of which has previously been published to this website in segments. The book is an attempt to think about politics and history from a perspective of organizing along lines of difference rather than identity. This resulted in a number of paradoxes, which I view as irresolvable, and necessarily so. I like to think of the concept of civil war as a kind of engine or motor that can be applied at the macro or micro level. I believe it is just as useful for thinking about international politics as it is for interpersonal conflict. It is, at once, a “real” legal and political fact, as well as an outlook and a sensitivity to the ways in which we encounter difference in the world. I remain in eternal debt to Nicole Loraux, who, in contradistinction with Tiqqun in Introduction to Civil War, and Agamben in Stasis (still the two most common reference points for a political theory of civil war), consistently maintains the unstable macro/micro and legal/ethical play of civil war without attempting to resolve one in the other.

Previous Readers Take Note… I have spent a few months making some huge changes to the copy of The Savage Peace I originally uploaded here. I no longer feel positive about having the entirety of that text on the site available as posts. No worries if you enjoyed it, because it will remain available in the download section of our website. I was long dissatisfied with having left out any citation of the first edition and with the unruly length of the piece, and honestly the sloppiness of the piece. I cut it down by nearly 100 pages to just the core of the piece (even with the addition of an addendum), and have added citations. I have also struggled through the years to spread word, especially as I found it harder to stand behind some of these missteps and shortsightedness. I am in the process of figuring out what I will do with the new manuscript, but it likely won’t appear here for the reasons already stated. I still have a limited amount of physical copies of this first edition I had printed to sell at cost, 5$ (plus 3$ shipping). Email me at sashavs@riseup.net if you want one. The whole book is available to download as a PDF for free. You can also download an imposed copy to print and bootleg. Enjoy —Sasha Durakov

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Addendum—Political Paradigms Diagram

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