Stasis : Avenues to Ancient Civil War

Welcome to Stasis – Avenues to Ancient Civil War, an academic blog on polarization, internal conflict, and reconciliation in antiquity. Internal conflict has shaped the course of civilizations, and studying this multifaceted phenomenon offers invaluable insight into the cohesive forces and disintegrative potentials of human culture. Yet our understanding of how polarization, violent disintegration, and reconciliation transformed the ancient world remains limited to date. Against this backdrop, this blog – and a new book series Studies in Ancient Civil War (StACW) to which it is related – provide unique and timely academic fora for exploring the processes and implications of civil war in antiquity, from factionalization and destructive internal strife to reintegration and reconstruction. Interconnecting historical, philological, and archaeological perspectives, the blog covers the wider Mediterranean world and the Near East from the second millennium BCE through the first millennium CE. It seeks to deepen our understanding of the profound impact that the collapse and reconstruction of political orders in civil wars had on ancient societies. The blog welcomes contributions exploring any given aspect of ancient civil war (including its wider socio-political, cultural, and ideological implications), and examining its lasting reverberations throughout time. Posts on this blog can have the form of source readings, reviews, opinion pieces, project presentations, introductions to forthcoming articles and book etc. We invite scholarly contributions from all fields of study related to the ancient world, from the archaic period through late antiquity, including the early medieval period, early Byzantium, and early Islam. All contributions are subject to peer review to maintain academic quality standards. Authors can republish their posts in the submitted, accepted, or published version in other repositories, on their own website, in journals or books at any time. The blog uses persistent identifyers: Each post has a unique and permanent URL as well as a registered DOI and registered metadata.