Review of How Civil Wars Start (And how to stop them)

By Barbara F. Walter

Published by Viking

RRP $35.00

I recently reviewed Trump’s Australia, a disturbing book which carefully analyses the threat that a second Trump term as US President might pose to American democracy. For those concerned about the potential for such a development, this book by Professor Barbara Walter, is the perfect follow up read.

“Barbara F. Walter is the Rohr Professor on International Relations at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Walter runs the award-winning blog, Political Violence at a Glance and has written for the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Reuters and Foreign Affairs.

Walter is well qualified to write this book having “advised on political violence everywhere from the CIA to the US Senate, the United Nations to the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office…”

When most of us hear the term civil war we think of the United States in the 1860’s. Walter explains:

“We picture officers on horseback, and blue and grey-clad infantrymen charging each other on enormous battlefields… Or we remember Pickett’s Charge, commemorated in paintings, when a mass of Confederate soldiers attacked a wall of Union soldiers on the last day of the battle of Gettysburg. We think of bodies littered upon empty fields.”

As the book progresses, we learn that today’s civil wars look nothing like those of the distant past, and most readers will then be surprised to learn that we are living in the world’s greatest era of civil war, threatening even the most hitherto seemingly stable democracies.

Chapter 1 is titled “The Danger of Anocracy.” I have to confess that anocracy was not a word with which I was familiar, and Walter’s explanation of its meaning and significance begins with the story of the invasion of Iraq by the US and the fall of strongman Sadam Hussein, and then the futile attempt to quickly democratise the country. We are told:

“The United States and the United Kingdom thought they were delivering freedom to a welcoming population. Instead, they were about to deliver the perfect conditions for civil war.”

A country’s political system can be rated between +10 and -10. A full democracy will have a score between +6 and +10, whereas autocracies are scored at between -6 and -10. Both North Korea and Saudi Arabia fit here. We are told that an anocracy is a country that is in the middle zone, neither full autocracy nor full democracy, and that it is in this hallway house area that most civil wars occur. This can occur when a country is moving from autocracy towards democracy and vice versa, and there is greater danger if this happens very quickly, as was the case with Iraq.

Walter looks at some specific examples. One is the unravelling of Yugoslavia after the death of dictator Tito, who had managed to hold that ethnically diverse country together. We hear that the country was amalgam of eight peoples, five languages and three religions and that after Tito’s death people began to identify more strongly as being either Serbs, Bosnian Croats or Bosnian Muslims, and the country finally disintegrated into an horrific civil war.

Civil war risk factors increase when one faction in a changing political landscape feels, rightly or wrongly, that they are losing. It is pointed out that:

“Human beings hate to lose. They hate to lose money, games, jobs, respect, partners and, yes, status.”

And groups that feel disadvantaged are much more likely to resort to violence when they come to believe that all peaceful strategies have failed and that there is no hope. The example given is that of Northern Ireland where the Catholics had “protested for decades to try to gain fair political representation and equal treatment,” but nothing had changed. And we all know how things ended up there.

Interestingly, “one of the potentially destabilising events in highly factionalised autocracies” is an election, particularly when a downgraded group loses. A few examples are given, including the election of Abraham Lincoln. We are told:

“America’s 1860 election was devastating to Southern Democrats because a candidate was able to win the White House without a single electoral vote from the once-powerful South. Republicans-whose platform included abolishing slavery-no longer needed to cater to Southerners in order to win office.”

This then prompted the Southerners to secede, leading to a bloody civil war.

Chapter 5 is titled “The Accelerant”, which unsurprisingly relates to the issue of the role of social media, it being noted that it is “not likely to be a coincidence that the global shift away from democracy has tracked so closely with the advent of the internet, the introduction of smart phones, and the widespread use of social media.” All these developments have permitted the rapid spread of mis-information and given conspiracy theorists, demagogues and others a platform which they would not have had in earlier times. Things are made worse by the nature of the algorithms used by the social media platforms. They profit when something goes viral, irrespective of whether what is being spread is true or false. Outrage and anger make them money.

It is in chapter 6 that Walter turns her particular attention to the present situation in the United States to consider how close it is the civil war. She begins the discussion with the events of 6 January 2021 when a defeated Donald Trump addressed an angry mob of his supporters before they attacked the Capitol in a vain attempt to prevent Joe Biden being certified as the election winner.

The author carefully analyses the various factors and worryingly comments:

“If you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at events in America-the same way you’d look at events in Ukraine or the Ivory Coast or Venezuela-you would go down a checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make civil war likely. And what you would find is that the United States, a democracy founded more than two centuries ago, has entered very dangerous territory.”

Conditions such as the fact that:

· In January 2021 it had an anocracy score of only +5,

· It is heavily divided or factionalised, with Trump shamelessly playing the race card and encouraging division and conflict,

· Some groups, particularly some white people, feel that they are losing status and are resentful and angry,

· There has been a huge rise in the number of armed militias.

All these factors lead the author to conclude that, “we (the US) are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe.”

Chapter 7 examines what a modern day American civil war would look like, and in the final chapter the author looks at what America and Americans should, or must, do to change things in order to prevent the unthinkable. However, she is not without optimism that it can be done, even though there are no easy solutions. Reigning in social media is one important step to reduce factionalism.

This is a scholarly, well written, well thought out and challenging book which deserves a wide readership.

John Watts