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March 11 - March 25, 2022
Civil war in the twenty-first century is distinctly different from civil wars of the past. Gone are the large battlefields, the armies, and the conventional tactics. Today, civil wars are waged primarily by different ethnic and religious groups, by guerrilla soldiers and militias, who often target civilians.
It turns out that one of the best predictors of whether a country will experience a civil war is whether it is moving toward or away from democracy. Yes, democracy. Countries almost never go from full autocracy to full democracy without a rocky transition in between. Attempts by leaders to democratize frequently include significant backsliding or stagnation in a pseudo-autocratic middle zone.
Experts call countries in this middle zone “anocracies”—they are neither full autocracies nor democracies but something in between.
A primary reason for revolt is that democratic transitions create new winners and losers: In the shift away from autocracy,
formerly disenfranchised citizens come into new power, while those who once held privileges find themselves losing influence. Because the new government in an anocracy is often fragile, and the rule of law is still developing, the losers—former elites, opposition leaders, citizens who once enjoyed advantages—are not sure the administration will be fair, or that they will be protected. This can create genuine anxieties about the future: The losers may not be convinced of a leader’s commitment to democracy; they may feel their own needs and rights are at stake.
But democratization is possible. Though the path to democracy is treacherous, the risk of civil war fades when a country takes its time, evolving its political system gradually. Mexico weathered democratization relatively peacefully. Its transition lasted nearly twenty years, from 1982 until 2000, when the National Action Party (PAN) became the first opposition party to win a presidential election since 1929. The state remained strong and continued to function while democratic institutions matured. Slow reform reduces uncertainty for a country’s citizens and is less threatening to incumbent
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THE LOVE AFFAIR with democratization that marked the twentieth century and the very beginning of the twenty-first century is over. It ended in 2006, when the number of democracies around the world reached its peak. Even democracies once considered secure, such as France and Costa Rica, have experienced erosion, as have places like Iceland, which has not protected rights and freedoms equally across all social groups.
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. When I asked Noor to describe what changed before civil war erupted in her homeland, she looked at me for a moment. Soft-spoken and reserved, she radiated the quiet confidence of someone who doesn’t break easily. Her face, however, was heavy with sadness. “People began asking whether you were Shia or Sunni,” she said.
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.
Two variables—anocracy and factionalism—predicted better than anything else where civil wars were likely to break out.
Factionalism, experts have found, tends to emerge in a predictable way. Elites and supporters of a particular group sense an opportunity—perhaps a moment of weakness in the regime, or a demographic change that heightens their sense of grievance or vulnerability. They then encourage loyalty, not by rallying people around policy issues but by using words and symbols related to identity—religious phrases, historical rallying cries, visual images.
It was that the battle, in many ways, embodied one of the greatest fault lines that tend to emerge among superfactions: the urban-rural divide, a divide that has become only deeper in an age of globalization and technological innovation.
One of the great worries of the twenty-first century is not only that democracy is declining, but that it is declining in some of the largest democracies around the world. Whereas politics in these places once revolved primarily around differing visions of governance—taxes, the social safety net, healthcare, education—politicians and their parties are increasingly coalescing around identity: religious views, racial backgrounds, urban and rural values.
One of the first things they found, perhaps unsurprisingly, was that the groups that turn violent generally feel left out of the political process. They have limited voting rights and almost no access to government positions; they tend to be excluded from political power. But the most powerful determinant of violence, researchers discovered, was the trajectory of a group’s political status. People were especially likely to fight if they had once held power and saw it slipping away.
Indeed, immigration is often the flashpoint for conflict. Migrants come into a country and compete with poorer, more rural populations—sons of the soil—fueling resentment and pushing these groups toward violence. It is especially alarming, then, that the world is entering an unprecedented period of human migration, in
large part due to climate change.
Failed protests are a sign that moderates and their methods have failed.
Protests are a warning sign. They indicate that citizens believe their system still works but is troubled. Since 2010, protests have surged around the world.
What’s disturbing is that these protests are failing at a higher rate than ever before. In the 1990s, peaceful protests had a 65 percent success rate, meaning that they resulted in the overthrow of a government or the gaining of independence. But since 2010, the success rate has dropped to 34 percent.
Elections give people hope. They focus citizens’ attention on the long game; people believe that even if they lose today, they could win tomorrow. And the more hopeful citizens are about the future, the more likely they are to try to peacefully work within the system. But if the losing side believes that it will never gain or regain power, then hope disappears.
Elections themselves can lead to factionalization, encouraging politicians to “play the ethnic card”—a strategy whereby they consciously generate deep feelings of ethnic nationalism and grievance in order to mobilize the support necessary to bring themselves to power.
In some ways, it is the peaceful precursor to armed mobilization. Once elections take place, party leaders have a ready-made band of supporters, some of whom may be willing to fight. The line separating an organized political faction from an armed faction can be dangerously thin—particularly in countries where weapons are easily accessed and distributed.
these flashpoints have long backstories. Most of the time, civil wars start with small bands of extremists—students, exiled dissidents, former members of the military—who care more deeply about power and politics than the average citizen.
By the time average citizens are aware that a militant group has formed, it is often older and stronger than people think.
Governments can become inadvertent recruiters for militant groups. Multiple studies have found that if a government responds with brutal force to the early mobilization of an extremist group, local support for even unpopular groups increases. A government’s attack on its own citizens has the power to transform the man on the street into a radical.
Early militants, of course, know that civilian deaths at the hands of the government can tip conflicts into all-out war; they see the opportunity in a harsh government response and plan accordingly.
“Nothing radicalizes a people faster than the unleashing of undisciplined security forces on its towns and villages.” That’s why civil wars appear to explode after governments decide to play hardball. Extremists have already embraced militancy. What changes is that average citizens now decide that it’s in their interest to do so as well.
Violent extremists can also take advantage of peaceful protest movements to sow chaos. Erica Chenoweth calls these people violent conflict entrepreneurs. They try to hijack a social movement by nudging it toward violence. Partly this is designed to provoke a harsh counterattack by the government, but partly it is designed to generate fear and insecurity among the protesters themselves, convincing more moderate members that they need to take up arms.
Key government constituencies—a ruling elite, a voting base, the military brass—can also nudge a country toward conflict. Leaders who are beholden to any or all of these groups might find themselves taking, rather than giving, orders.
Ignorance can also lead governments to overreact, triggering wider conflict. Studies have shown that governments are especially likely to over-respond in regions where a weak on-the-ground presence has left them out of touch and stripped of influence.
In the years that followed, dozens of journalists, companies, human rights organizations, foreign governments, and even citizens of Myanmar continued to alert Facebook to the unchecked spread of hate speech and misinformation on the platform. But Facebook remained silent, refusing to acknowledge the problem.
The world looked to Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who had championed democracy, for a response. But she did not acknowledge the violence,
The problem is social media’s business model. To make money, technology companies like Facebook, YouTube, Google, and Twitter need to keep people on their platforms—or as they call it, “engaged”—for as long as possible. The longer users remain online—clicking on links about kittens, retweeting stories about celebrities, or sharing videos—the more advertising revenue the companies receive.
It turns out that what people like the most is fear over calm, falsehood over truth, outrage over empathy. People are far more apt to like posts that are incendiary than those that are not, creating an incentive for people to post provocative material in the hopes that it will go viral.
Social media offers these candidates not only an unregulated environment but also multiple platforms from which to disseminate information and propaganda (candidates can reach different audiences on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook). In the past, if a politician wanted to influence voters, they had to go through gatekeepers: party leaders and major networks and newspapers. Social media has allowed any candidate and any party—no matter how fringe—to circumvent these controls.
The way social media is structured is Darwinian—it is the survival of the fittest, where the most aggressive and most brazen voices drown out everyone else. And in the contest between liberal democracies and authoritarian regimes, social media is inadvertently helping the autocrats win.
JAMES MADISON AND Alexander Hamilton believed that if American democracy were to die, it would happen at the hands of a faction. The greatest threat to the republic, wrote the authors of the Federalist Papers, was not an outside adversary but a homegrown group ravenous for control.
In the 1970s, most violent extremist groups in the United States were left leaning. Today, less than a quarter are. During Obama’s presidency, the country began to see an increase in far-right organizations plotting racially motivated attacks. About 65 percent of far-right extremists in the United States today have white supremacist elements. These groups are, in the words of the FBI, “motivated by a hatred of other races and religions,” and they have more guns and more members than militias of the past.
Those who wage war against their governments in the twenty-first century tend to avoid the battlefield entirely; they know they will almost certainly lose in a conventional war against a powerful government. Instead, they choose the strategy of the weak: guerrilla warfare and terrorism. And, increasingly, domestic terror campaigns are aimed at democratic governments.
Terror is also surprisingly easy to pull off in democracies, where there is more freedom of movement and less surveillance. There are also numerous constitutional constraints against labeling domestic groups terrorists, giving them more leeway than foreign terrorists would have.
They will go online to plan their resistance, strategizing how to undermine the government at every level and gain control of parts of America. They will create chaos and fear. And then they will force Americans to pick sides.
Increasingly, civil wars involve some type of ethnic cleansing, and—thanks in part to these texts—there is every reason to suspect that this is where an escalating campaign of far-right terror in the United States would lead. In their quest to reset the country’s social order, terrorists would aim to turn citizens against the federal government; convince moderates to accept the new status quo; intimidate minorities into remaining silent; and deter new immigrants from coming.
this is where a document by Gregory Stanton, the president of Genocide Watch, proves extremely useful. The document, titled “The Ten Stages of Genocide,” argues that countries go through eight steps before they reach genocide, and forcibly moving minorities out of a region is one of them.
Stage seven is significant, in other words, because it’s when the logic of genocide develops as a means of self-defense. It’s common to think that ethnic cleansing is driven by hate. There is hate, yes, but the real fuel is fear—fear that you are threatened and vulnerable. Violence entrepreneurs tap into this anxiety, exploiting the survival instinct that cues you to destroy your enemy before he can destroy you.
South Africa reminds us of the power of leaders—business leaders, political leaders, opposition leaders. Leaders can compromise in the face of danger, or they can choose to fight. Botha chose to fight. De Klerk and Mandela chose to work together.
Mandela, who had originally been in favor of violent resistance, could have advocated ethnic violence—he could have been an ethnic entrepreneur, tapping the anger and resentment of his Black countrymen to seek full control of South Africa through civil war. But instead he preached healing, unity, and peace. It was the leaders in charge who spared South Africa more conflict and bloodshed.
Since 2000, two presidents have lost the popular vote but won the election after electoral college victories. Switching to a system where the popular vote determines who is president would prevent that, and also make it virtually impossible to win without appealing across racial lines. Want to know how to undercut destructive ethnic factions in the United States? Make each citizen’s vote count equally rather than giving preferential treatment to the white, rural vote.
Thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, individual donors can contribute unlimited amounts of cash to tilt the political scale in favor of candidates aligned with their own, rather than the country’s, best interests. The handful of individuals who donate billions of dollars to float dubious campaigns also tend to be far more ideologically extreme than the average American citizen.
The U.S. government shouldn’t indulge extremists—the creation of a white ethno-state would be disastrous for the country—nor should it exempt them from federal laws, but it could address grievances that affect a broad range of citizens, improving living standards and increasing social mobility after decades of decline. As Robert A. Johnson, head of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, put it: If America put “much more money and energy…into public school systems, parks and recreation, the arts, and healthcare, it could take an awful lot of sting out of society. We’ve largely dismantled
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We need them all: Countries with low birth rates that try to stop immigration will slowly die because their populations will dwindle. Our democracy will have to protect the rights of small groups while also forging a unifying national identity. We will need to show the world that a transition to multiethnic democracy can be done peacefully and with no decline in prosperity.
