Talkbits on Civil War: Civility Unmasked

In this installment of our ongoing series of audiovisual conversations on civil war, Bishnupriya Ghosh helps us think civility as a handmaiden to power, traversing histories of colonial violence and contemporary populisms.

“What seems very productive to me in your thinking about civil war is that war is always the underside, because civility or civil society means a certain kind of forceful or forcible guarding; it has a logic of segregation that’s built on structural racism and class divisions.”

“My personal interest has always been in […] the history of the popular, which is not the liberal fiction of the people embodied in the state, but in postcolonial and Global South studies, where its always been the uncivil—this kind of large groups of people who have always been populations in the demographic calculus of the state, but who were always becoming civil. They never quite made it into civility.”