How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them

A professor at Northwestern University, Ted Robert Gurr, first coined the term “anocracy” in 1974 to describe regimes that were neither fully autocratic nor fully democratic. Walter notes that “citizens receive some elements of democratic rule—perhaps full voting rights—but they also live under leaders with extensive authoritarian powers and few checks and balances” (12). “Illiberal democracy” represents another term for this form of government. Civil wars occur the most in anocracies.

The word “autocracy” comes from two Greek words. The first is autos, which means “self,” and the second is kratos, which means “power.” Thus, autocracy is a form of government in which one person has absolute power over a state. Unlike in democracies, people living under autocratic governments do not have a say in determining their country’s laws or the enforcement of these laws. There is also no system of checks and balances on the autocratic ruler. Dissent is typically not tolerated by autocratic governments and is often brutally suppressed.

In the book, Walter cites three widely used datasets that quantify a country’s system of governance: the Polity Project’s Polity Score, Freedom House, and V-Dem. These datasets have their own definitions of democracy, resulting in them measuring democracy in three different ways.