How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them

“But as I did this work, I realized something unnerving: The warning signs of instability that we have identified in other places are the same signs that, over the past decade, I’ve begun to see on our own soil.”

One of the main themes in this book is American Democracy and Its Vulnerabilities. Walter hopes to leverage her extensive expertise on civil wars, violent extremism, and domestic terrorism to help readers understand how civil wars start so that Americans can prevent another one from occurring in the US. Interviews with survivors of civil wars around the world illustrate how civil wars often sneak up on people. Walter does not want this to be the case in the US, which is also her home.

“As one Sunni citizen noted, ‘We were on top of the system. We had dreams. Now we are the losers. We lost our positions, our status, and the security of our families, stability.’”

This passage highlights one key risk factor that leads to civil wars, which is how anocracy creates losers in countries that attempt to rapidly democratize from a previously autocratic state. Here, a Sunni citizen recounts how Sunni Muslims were politically, economically, and socially powerful under Saddam Hussein. Saddam, who was also Sunni Muslim, only gave political power to other Sunnis. Thus, Sunni Muslims represented the elite group in Iraq. The power dynamic changed after US government officials shifted the balance of political power from Sunni to Shia Muslims, which left many Sunni Muslims concerned about their future. These concerns morphed into anger at being left behind by the transitional government, which led to Sunni Muslims forming militias to fight against what they perceived as injustices. Shia Muslims also formed their own militias to counter the Sunni militias, which further increased the religious tension in the country. Ultimately, a civil war broke out.

“All the things that experts thought should matter in the outbreak of civil war somehow didn’t. It wasn’t the poorest countries that were at the highest risk of conflict, or the most unequal, or the most ethnically or religiously heterogenous, or even the most repressive. It was living in a partial democracy that made citizens more likely to pick up a gun and begin to fight.”

In Chapter 1, Walter underscores how civil wars only break out in anocracies, which is the transitional stage between autocracies and democracies. Civil wars do not occur in fully autocratic or fully democratic governments for two main reasons. The first is that governments are too strong under these types of governments. Under autocratic governments, the ruler represses all dissent. Under democratic governments, people have other outlets, including civic engagement, to impact change. The second is that the political elite does not rapidly change. Part of the political instability seen in anocracies is because the elite are unexpectedly no longer in such positions of power.

“Why do some countries safely navigate the road through the anocracy zone, while others become engulfed in cycles of chaos and violence? The story of Iraq again offers a clue. I asked Noor to describe what changed before civil war erupted in her homeland […] ‘People began asking whether you were Shia or Sunni,’ she said.”

Throughout the book, Walter focuses on the stories of ordinary people who have lived through civil wars to demonstrate how it is easy to miss the signs of a looming civil war. In Chapter 1, Walter uses the recollections of Noor, who was an Iraqi teenager at the time of the US invasion of Iraq, to show how the country descended into civil war. Religious factionalism became one of the driving forces of political instability. According to Noor, under Saddam’s rule, Iraqis identified themselves as Iraqi rather than by a religious group. The US invasion changed this.

“Countries that factionalize have political parties based on ethnic, religious, or racial identity rather than ideology, and these parties then seek to rule at the exclusion and expense of others.”

Factionalism is one of two variables that best predict where a civil war might break out. To Walter, factionalism is especially dangerous because it results in ethnic entrepreneurs pitting citizens against one another. Ethnic entrepreneurs often use fearmongering to coalesce citizens around a particular identity. They spread lies about the other groups to increase feelings of vulnerability and suspicion among their supporters. By doing so, ethnic entrepreneurs create an environment where their supporters are willing to use violence to protect a way of life they believe is under threat by others outside of their group.

“These instigators of wars are often at high risk of losing power or have recently lost it. Seeing no other routes to securing their futures—because, perhaps, they are ex-Communists—they cynically exploit divisions to try and reassert control. They foster identity-based nationalism to sow violence and chaos, using a strategy scholars call ‘gambling for resurrection’—an aggressive effort to provoke massive change, even against the odds.”

In this passage, Walter describes ethnic entrepreneurs. In Chapter 2, Walter discusses several individuals who fall under this category, including Slobodan Milošević, Narendra Modi, and Jair Bolsonaro. All three of these individuals used predatory politics to rise and maintain political power at the cost of the stability of their country. Average citizens in each of these leaders’ countries likely viewed the ethnic and racial propaganda as ramblings of political leaders who would do anything to maintain power. These citizens often do not realize how ethnic entrepreneurs create deep fault lines until they are elected or take over.

“Daris often thinks back on all the propaganda of those days, and the alarmism that Milošević promoted among Serbs. ‘I didn’t know at the time that this was a big, big danger,’ he said. ‘We were all just good citizens, following what we believed. It was when everyone split, gravitation toward their own group, that I realized this hadn’t happened in [a matter of] days and months. It had been happening over years.’”

Walter uses recollections by Daris to emphasize that while civil wars appear to sneak up on ordinary citizens, there are signs of the impending societal collapse months and years before. Daris and his wife, Berina, never thought they would live through a civil war, yet during Walter’s interviews with them both, they pinpointed specific examples of when political, ethnic, and religious tensions worsened. One point Walter emphasizes is that people who join self-serving factions are often unaware they are doing so. Instead, they believe they are doing what is best for them, their families, and their country.

“The Moro people of Mindanao had been gradually disempowered over the course of colonial rule and then again after they were incorporated into the Philippines. They had once governed their home region […] It was only after the Philippine government began to encourage the much larger Catholic population to migrate to Mindanao—displacing the Muslim locals—that the violence began.”

Walter uses the Moro people to illustrate the dark consequences of losing political, economic, and social status. The Moro people are what Walter calls sons of the soil. They are indigenous to the Mindanao region. Due to their strong cultural ties to the area, they dominated politics until the colonial and subsequent Filipino national governments chipped away at their power, including by encouraging the migration of non-locals to the area and giving them more political power than the Moro. In doing so, the Moro began to fear their loss of identity and power, both of which they felt were deserved as they were the indigenous group. This risk factor helps explain why the Moro turned to violence rather than other religious or identity groups in the Mindanao region.

“Downgrading is a psychological reality as much as it is a political or demographic fact. Downgraded factions can be rich or poor, Christian or Muslim, white or Black. What matters is that members of the group feel a loss of status to which they believe they are entitled and are embittered as a result.”

Downgrading is a key concept that Walter introduces in Chapter 3. It helps explain why certain groups turn to violence when there are plenty of groups living in factionalized anocracies around the world who do not do so. The underlying tenet is that groups who lose power but feel they deserve this power are more prone to violent acts. Walter argues that these groups represent the most dangerous factions in the modern era.

“A 2016 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that armed conflict was more likely in ethnically fractionalized countries after climate-related disasters. Between 1980 and 2010, conflicts in almost a quarter of these countries coincided with climatic calamities that acted as threat multipliers.”

While Walter only briefly touches on the role of climate calamities in sparking political unrest and violence, it is an important point. Human-driven climate change is having profound impacts on societies across the globe, including the rise of human migration. Immigration is especially concerning to Walter since it often acts as a flashpoint for civil war, as evidenced by Walter’s three main case studies in Chapter 3. Thus, she raises the alarm that increased migration due to climate change in the modern era could spark even more civil wars in the coming years.

“Catholics didn’t want war. They had peacefully protested for decades to try to gain fair political representation and equal treatment in Northern Ireland […] In January 1969, they had organized a ‘Long March’ from Belfast to Derry modeled on the march from Selma to Montgomery in the United States. But Protestants, through it all, had shown no interest in compromise. Nothing changed.”

In Chapter 4, Walter adds another dimension to her theme that there are Patterns and Risk Factors for Civil Wars: the importance of a loss of hope. In the case study of the Northern Ireland civil war, Walter shows how the Irish Catholics progressively began to lose hope. For decades, they tried to gain equality in their homeland through non-violent means but were routinely met by violence by Protestants and the British government. As a result, Irish Catholics eventually gave up hope that non-violence would lead to change. Extremists were able to take over the reform movement, pushing the movement toward violence.

“Failed protests create dangerous moments in a country ripe for civil war. Elections can have the same effect.”

Walter explores how failed protests and failed elections contribute to loss of hope, which helps trigger civil wars. Successful protests and elections can create political stability. They offer citizens a means of hope that they themselves can enact change in their country. When protests and elections fail, citizens lose hope. This loss of hope opens the door for extremist groups to take over once-peaceful reform movements. These groups often care only about their power and see violence as the main way to gain or regain power.

“Civil war is sometimes traced to a single incident: a trigger […] But these flashpoints have long backstories.”

Many people assume that civil wars have a single trigger, yet Walter shows over and over again that this is far from true. Often these so-called triggers have long backstories, as was the case for the civil wars in Northern Ireland and Syria. People eventually lose hope, which opens the door for extremist groups to take over. Violence becomes more likely once this happens.

“And Tristan Harris, an American computer scientist and a former ethicist at Google, explained the incentives in a 2019 interview with The New York Times: ‘If I’m YouTube and I want you to watch more, I’m always going to steer you toward crazytown.’”

This quote highlights one of the central issues within the theme of Social Media’s Corrosive Influence on Democracy: their business model of engagement. Here, Harris explains how platforms encourage engagement by showing more incendiary content. Research has illustrated that people are more likely to engage with this type of content. Walter expresses extreme concern about this business model. She believes social media companies have intentionally ignored points in time when they could have made meaningful changes to their platform to stop the spread of misinformation and disinformation since it would have reduced engagement. Social media companies have cared more about profit than the corrosive impacts their platforms are having on democracies around the world.

“One might think the move away from democracy would make these leaders unpopular, but by the time they consolidate power, they have successfully wielded their favorite means of communication—social media—to convince voters that anti-democratic measures are needed to preserve the country’s peace and their own prosperity.”

Prior to social media, ethnic entrepreneurs had a harder time rising to power because they faced numerous hurdles, including being kept out of major media platforms and blocked by traditional political systems. Social media has now enabled these leaders to reach a wide audience for the first time. Populist leaders are able to more easily spread their propaganda and lies, enabling them to manipulate people into believing their democratic institutions are broken and unfixable. As a result, people turn to these populist leaders as an alternative to the current system of government. Populist leaders are thus able to consolidate their authoritarian power with ordinary peoples’ support.

“Social media has been so instrumental for these purposes that, as one Islamic State defector noted, its practitioners are rewarded accordingly. ‘The media people are more important than the soldiers…Their monthly income is higher. They have better cars. They have the power to bring more recruits to the Islamic State.’”

The rise of the Islamic State drives home the organizational and destructive power of social media. As this passage highlights, the Islamic State were prolific users of social media to disseminate their propaganda. By doing so, they were able to radicalize people far from the Middle East, many of whom left their home countries to join the Islamic State.

“The US became an anocracy for the first time in more than two hundred years.”

Prior to the presidency of Donald Trump, the US represented the oldest continuous democracy in the world. Trump and the Republican party more broadly, however, exacerbated growing ethnic tensions in the country, which resulted in the US dropping from a full democracy to an anocracy within a span of five years, exposing American Democracy and Its Vulnerabilities. While the country’s institutions have so far prevented the complete collapse of the US, Walter remains concerned since the US is currently in the most dangerous political stage: a partial democracy, which is where most civil wars occur.

“It was James Madison and Alexander Hamilton’s worst fear: the dismantling of democracy by a faction’s cynical bid for power.”

The Founding Fathers believed that internal factions rather than external forces would be the case of the death of American democracy. Some 200 years later, their fears are coming true, according to Walter. She believes that the Republican party represents a predatory faction since it is doing everything it can to stay in power, including subverting election results, attacking other democratic principles, exacerbating ethnic tensions.

“We are a factionalized country on the edge of anocracy that is quickly approaching the open insurgency stage, which means we are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe.”

This quote succinctly summarizes Walter’s answer to the question: Where is the United States today in relation to a civil war? Throughout Chapter 6, Walter meticulously documents how the US displays all four risk factors that prelude civil wars. She intentionally does this to raise alarm bells for American readers. She wants readers to see that the US is on the brink of failing in hopes that citizens can prevent its collapse all together.

“Consider the recent decision made by the town clerk in Stratton, Vermont, to use the following language on the cover of the town’s annual report: ‘You came here from there because you didn’t like there, and now you want to change here to be like there […] You are welcome here, but please stop trying to make here like there. If you want here to be like there you should not have left there to come here, and you are invited to leave here and go back there at your earliest convenience.’”

This passage represents a recent example of how xenophobia is on the rise in the US according to Walter. Language like this helps turn everyday citizens against people they consider other and the federal government. It also discourages immigration and intimidates people into remaining silent or passive. Militia groups are starting to use similar language for exactly this purpose, which worries Walter since this is often an early warning sign before ethnic cleansing.

“This existential fear leads to a domestic arms race, in which one group is made to feel insecure and, in an attempt to feel more secure, forms militias and purchases weapons, which in turn makes the rival group feel insecure, and so it, too, forms militias and purchases weapons—which then triggers the original side to arm itself even more.”

Walter has discussed this domestic arms race elsewhere in the book, but she summarizes her argument and concerns here. Arms races are dangerous because they not only increase the number of weapons available to people but also further stoke fear and division between groups. An armed population with strong feelings of fear and vulnerability under a weak or weakening government increases the likelihood of civil war. Walter suggests there are early sign that an arms race is taking place in the US with the rise of gun purchases by both left- and right-leaning Americans.

“In fact, unlike in other countries, such as Canada, the United States designates only foreign (not domestic) groups as terrorist organizations. There is no law that criminalizes domestic terrorism—none of the Capitol insurgents could be arrested on these grounds.”

Walter drives home the fact that psychological biases prevent Americans from recognizing the threat of domestic terrorism. The US does not designate domestic groups as terrorist organizations even when they act like them. This strategy has hindered the US’s ability to identify and infiltrate far-right groups. Walter emphasizes that the US needs to both acknowledge and deal with its domestic terrorism issue, as failure to do so will only increase the likelihood of a civil war.

“The best way to neutralize a budding insurgency is to reform a degraded government: bolster the rule of law, give all citizens access to the vote, and improve the quality of government services.”

Just as there are Patterns and Risk Factors for Civil Wars, there are also tools to fix a government before it collapses. Walter argues that the best method is to reform a government. In particular, people need to see that the government serves them and that its institutions are accountable, strong, and legitimate. Effective governments can then more easily counter terrorism strategies that extremist groups employ to destabilize democracies.