Workshop "Defining Enemies and Allies in Civil Wars", December 5 – 6 2025

Civil wars do not simply break out – they are an outgrowth of a certain kind of enmity that existed prior to armed conflict. Once triggered, they create new enmities that are later perpetuated in popular culture or used for political purposes. The participants of the workshop “Defining Enemies and Allies in Civil Wars”, which took place on December 5 – 6 2025 in Heidelberg and was organized by Liudmila Novikova, took a closer look at such dynamics of enmity in major nineteenth- and twentieth-century civil wars, including the American, Russian, Irish, Spanish, Greek, and Chinese Civil Wars.

The first panel opened with new perspectives on the American Civil War. Martin Geyer, former professor for Modern History at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, shared findings from his current research project that deals with states of exceptions and legal concepts of necessity in the 19th and 20th century. He examined how martial law and the notion of necessity shaped the legal and political handling of so-called public enemies in the American Civil War, a label that was used for both Southern secessionists and Northern critics of Lincoln's policies. 

In his subsequent talk, Curt Engelhorn Professor of American History in Heidelberg, Manfred Berg, reacted to the current debates about whether the United States might face a new civil war. After first probing the historical analogy between the mid-19th century and the status quo, he then presented two future scenarios for the United States, both of which took into account the current polarization of US society and politics.

The second panel shifted the focus from a national perspective to the actors of civil wars. Christin Hansen, postdoctoral research assistant at the Chair of Modern History at the University of Trier, shed light on the multiple ways women were involved in the Spanish Civil War as well as the ambivalent perception of their role, oscillating between heroization and ethical reproach. 

Charalampos Minasidis from Yale University then adopted a cultural studies approach in his talk about political songs in the Greek Civil Wars between 1915 and 1949. He underlined the crucial role of music as a tool for disseminating ideologies, shaping collective identities and constructing the dichotomy of friend versus enemy. 

Concluding the first day, Yiannis Kokosalakis, Associate Researcher at the Department of History in Bielefeld, reflected on the politically 'creative' side of civil wars, namely the complex form of political coalition building that both drives and follows the political polarisation leading to violent conflict.

The organiser Liudmila Novikova, research fellow at the HCTS Heidelberg, initiated the first panel of the second day that was dedicated to the Russian Civil War. She took a closer look at the local contexts in which mobilization and violence occurred and demonstrated how broader political struggles intersected with local factors, such as specific economic conditions or longstanding hostilities between neighboring communities.

Building on this, Ivan Sablin, associated with Heidelberg University and the Institute of Contemporary History in Ljubljana, expanded the framework by including Russian, Qing and Japanese (post-)imperial conflicts in his considerations. By tracing these intersecting civil wars, he highlighted the diversity of actors involved in building a new (post)imperial order in North Asia and their competing visions for the region’s future.

Sofya Anisimova from Dublin University also advocated a transnational approach that she critically examined. She summarized her experience conducting research for the ERC project „The Age of Civil Wars in Europe, 1914–1949“ and pleaded for an investigation of the shared dimensions of different civil wars across the continent, rather than a search for direct connections.

The final panel about memory and representations of civil wars was opened by Síobhra Aiken from Queen’s University Belfast with a lecture about the ‘myths of silence’ surrounding the Irish Civil War. Its official discourse was shaped by the view that the events of the conflict were not discussed, leading to marginalization and dismissal of veteran’s testimonies about their experiences. Aiken mapped the lengths they went in order to tell their stories despite the emphasis on silence in official discourses.

Nicolas Schillinger from the University of Duisburg-Essen was the last speaker of the workshop. He dismantled the depiction of the Chinese Nationalists, the Kuomintang, in the movie The Eight Hundred (2020) and contextualised it with the recent interest of the People's Republic of China in the history of World War II, meanwhile applying new interpretative patterns that are reflected by the film. 

Find some impressions of the event in our gallery below.