How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them

by Barbara F. Walter

Citizens can absorb a lot of pain. They will accept years of discrimination and poverty and remain quiet, enduring the ache of slow decline. What they can’t take is the loss of hope.

This led to America’s polity score dropping from a +7 to a +5, the lowest score since 1800. The United States became an anocracy for the first time in more than two hundred years. Let that sink in. We are no longer the world’s oldest continuous democracy. That honor is now held by Switzerland, followed by New Zealand, and then Canada. We are no longer a peer to nations like Canada, Costa Rica, and Japan, which are all rated a +10 on the polity index.

Where is the United States today? 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.

Violence often springs from a sense of injustice, inequality, and insecurity—and a sense that those grievances and fears will not be addressed by the current system. But systems can change.

Until this study, we knew that anocracy left a country at higher risk of civil war, but we didn’t know exactly why. What was it about anocracies that made them particularly vulnerable? Or to put it another way, which features of democracy were more or less important? Fearon found that “all good things tend to go together” but that three features stood out: “the rule of law” (the equal and impartial application of legal procedure); “voice and accountability” (the extent to which citizens are able to participate in selecting their government, as well as freedom of expression, freedom of association, and a free media); and “government effectiveness” (the quality of public services and the quality and independence of the civil service). These three features reflect the degree to which a government serves its people and the degree to which its political institutions are strong, legitimate, and accountable. Improvements in governance tend to reduce the subsequent risk of war.

Milton Mayer, an American journalist who traveled to Germany in 1951, asked ordinary citizens about daily life in the years Hitler rose to power. One man, a baker, repeated a common refrain: “One had no time to think. There was so much going on.” Another German, a philologist, recounted that people could no more see it “developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.”

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

In the words of David Kilcullen—former special adviser for counterinsurgency in George W. Bush’s administration and chief counterterrorism strategist for the U.S. State Department—the most important thing governments can do is to “remedy grievances and fix problems of governance that create the conditions that extremists exploit.”

In the case of the United States, the federal government should renew its commitment to providing for its most vulnerable citizens, white, Black, or brown. We need to undo fifty years of declining social services, invest in safety nets and human capital across racial and religious lines, and prioritize high-quality early education, universal healthcare, and a higher minimum wage. Right now many working-class and middle-class ...

Governments can also undermine extremists’ attempts to intimidate. Intimidation works only because the local population doesn’t believe that the government can take care of them or protect them from violence. The best way to counter this is not only by reestablishing people’s trust in the legitimacy of government, but also by ensuring adequate law enforcement and justice. This signals that the government is capable of protecting the population and identifying and punishing the perpetrators of crimes. It also discourages citizens from seeking protection from the extremists, which is often the first step in switching moderates’ allegiance.

But political polarization does not increase the likelihood of civil war. What increases the likelihood of civil war is factionalization—when citizens form groups based on ethnic, religious, or geographic distinctions—and a country’s political parties become predatory, cutting out rivals and enacting policies that primarily benefit them and their constituents. And nothing abets and accelerates factionalization as much as social media.

As Voltaire once said, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

The U.S. government regulates all kinds of industries—from utilities and drug companies to food processing plants—to promote the common good. For the sake of democracy and societal cohesion, social media platforms should be added to the list.