An anatomy of civil wars

Civil conflicts often share common roots, but the landscape is changing fast. Can the old institutions still protect themselves?

Barbara Walter does not expect a civil war in the US of the order of the conflict that tore the nation apart in the 1860s, but that’s chiefly because civil wars are fought differently these days. And it’s about the only comfort a reader can take from this sobering account of how civil wars start in our time.

Walter is a professor of international relations at the University of California, San Diego, and a consultant to government and international agencies. In this book she draws on her work and that of other researchers to produce a typology of the descent into organised domestic violence.

The key concept is “anocracy”, a stage between autocracy and democracy. The transition can be made in either direction, and it is during the transition that most civil wars erupt. Autocracies possess sufficient powers of repression to keep potential insurgents in check; democracies allow dissidents means to effect change without resorting to violence. But when autocracies weaken, repression can fail, and when democracies ossify, the release valves get stuck.

A crucial development along the road to civil war is the emergence of factions. Walter observes that, in the early 20th century, class and ideology powered clashes. Hence the Russian revolution of 1917 and the Chinese revolution that began a decade later.

But after the second world war, civil wars increasingly reflected ethnic and religious factionalisation. By the late

20th century, such fault lines lay at the heart of most civil wars.

A case study to which Walter returns repeatedly is the breakup of Yugoslavia. Having been held together by the iron fist of Tito, the country fractured spectacularly on ethnic and religious lines after his death.

The Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević turned Tito’s policy on its head, fanning ethnic and religious flames.

Walter punctuates her account with recollections of her interviewees. One woman speaks about living in Sarajevo hardly noticing the religious and ethnic differences among her neighbours. But after Milošević and his imitators engaged the propaganda machinery, the social fabric was torn asunder. Walter’s source was at home with her young son in March 1992 when the lights went out. “And then suddenly you started to hear machine guns,” she said.

The factions most disposed to violence are “sons of the soil”. People with deep histories in a country, traditionally rural, they resent displacement by immigrants and urban elites. And the most important driver of late has been social media. “Social media is every ethnic entrepreneur’s dream,” writes Walter.

She notes that, on the scale employed by researchers in her field, the US has slipped into anocracy. The slide commenced in the 1990s with the emergence of partisan television networks; it continued with the efflorescence of Facebook, Twitter and weaponised talk radio. “Into this political morass stepped the biggest ethnic entrepreneur of all: Donald Trump.”

Walter’s recounting of Trump’s assaults on decency and democracy is familiar yet still chilling. The good news is that the bad news wasn’t worse. “America was lucky that its first modern autocratic president was neither smart nor politically experienced. Other ambitious, more effective Republicans – Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley – have taken note and will seek to do better.”

So what is a democrat to do? First, concentrate on improving the performance of government. She suggests federalising election laws, curtailing gerrymandering, curbing unaccountable campaign contributions and eliminating the electoral college. More vaguely, she recommends that government “renew its commitment to providing for its most vulnerable citizens”.

And social media must be regulated. “The US government regulates all kinds of industries … to promote the common good,” Walter writes. “For the sake of democracy and social cohesion, social media platforms should be added to the list.”

Will this be enough? Walter hopes so. But she expects domestic terrorism will continue to get worse, that insurgents and militias will continue to proliferate, and that demagogues like Trump will continue to encourage them.

Amid the 2020 election campaign, Walter and her husband, who between them possess Swiss, Canadian, Hungarian and German passports, considered their exit strategy from the US should things get really bad. It didn’t come to that. But they renewed their passports just in case.