How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them

by Barbara F. Walter

ETHNIC NATIONALISM, and its expression through factions, doesn’t take hold in a country on its own. For a society to fracture along identity lines, you need mouthpieces—people who are willing to make discriminatory appeals and pursue discriminatory policies in the name of a particular group. They are usually people who are seeking political office or trying to stay in office. They provoke and harness feelings of fear as a way to lock in the constituencies that will support their scramble for power.

Experts have a term for these individuals: ethnic entrepreneurs.

Harnessing the power of the media, which they often control, they work to convince citizens that they are under threat from an out-group and must band together under the entrepreneur to counter the threat.

Interestingly, average citizens are often clear-eyed about ethnic entrepreneurs: They know these individuals have their own agenda and are not telling the whole truth.

By early 1969, the MIM was training Muslim guerillas, likely financed by the Malaysian government, and by March 1970, sectarian violence had begun to break out. Catholic gangs began assaulting Muslim farmers and burning their homes, which provoked Muslims to retaliate. From there, conditions worsened, with Muslims accusing the government of encouraging Christian violence and Muslims forming their own armed bands. It was the classic “security dilemma,” in which people, fearing violence, arm themselves in self-defense, but in the process convince their enemy that they want war.

Over the years, the group has spawned numerous offshoots, often battling with an even more militant radical Islamist group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). Almost every president since Marcos has attempted to end what has become one of the world’s longest civil wars, offering various degrees of autonomy for the region. In most cases, the government has not delivered on its promises, and various Moro groups have continued to fight, leading to the deaths of more than one hundred thousand people.

Many modern civil conflicts follow this pattern. A study of eastern European countries over most of the twentieth century by Roger Petersen, a political scientist at MIT, found that a loss of political and cultural status fueled conflict in that region. Donald Horowitz, the political scientist at Duke who has studied hundreds of ethnic groups in divided societies, found the same thing. The ethnic groups that start wars are those claiming that the country “is or ought to be theirs.”

Downgrading is a psychological reality as much as it is a political or demographic fact. Downgraded factions can be rich or poor, Christian or Muslim, white or Black. What matters is that members of the group feel a loss of status to which they believe they are entitled and are embittered as a result. In case after case, resentment and rage appear to drive a faction to war. The Stanford scholars Fearon and Laitin found that when the Sinhalese of Sri Lanka tried to make Sinhala the official language of the state, it “immediately caused a reaction among Tamils, who perceived their language, culture, and economic position to be under attack.” There is almost always a sense of injustice, a belief that whoever is in power doesn’t deserve to be there and has no right to that exalted position.

People may tolerate years of poverty, unemployment, and discrimination. They may accept shoddy schools, poor hospitals, and neglected infrastructure. But there is one thing they will not tolerate: losing status in a place they believe is theirs. In the twenty-first century, the most dangerous factions are once-dominant groups facing decline.

Language, it turns out, is strongly tied to the identity of a nation, and it determines whose culture ultimately dominates. One of the main fears of ethnic Russians in the Donbas region of Ukraine was that the new nationalist government would make Ukrainian the official language of the state to the exclusion of Russian. It’s hard to compete for well-paying jobs if you don’t speak the language. Controlling access to education, especially higher education, is another way to elevate one ethnic group over another. The same is true of access to civil service jobs, which are some of the most steady and lucrative positions in a country. When people face the loss of such privileges, they can become deeply aggrieved and motivated to resist.

Income inequality, which many considered a red flag for war, proved to be the opposite. As James Fearon wrote in a 2010 report for the World Bank, “Not only is there no apparent positive correlation between income inequality and conflict, but if anything, across countries, those with more equal income distributions have been marginally more conflict prone.”

Scholars know where civil wars tend to break out and who tends to start them: downgraded groups in anocracies dominated by ethnic factions. But what triggers them? What finally tips a country into conflict? 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. It’s when a group looks into the future and sees nothing but additional pain that they start to see violence as their only path to progress.

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. “Something has really shifted,” acknowledged Chenoweth. And this leaves the world’s oldest and freest democracies increasingly vulnerable.

Elections are potentially destabilizing events in highly factionalized anocracies—especially when a downgraded group loses. In a study of global conflict between 1960 and 2000, researchers found that ethnic groups were more likely to resort to violence after they had lost an election.

But if the losing side believes that it will never gain or regain power, then hope disappears. 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.

CIVIL WAR IS sometimes traced to a single incident: a trigger. Sometimes it’s an election, sometimes a failed protest, sometimes a natural disaster. In the Philippines, it was the isolated massacre of Muslim army recruits by other service members. In Lebanon, it was the killing of a Christian man on his way to his son’s wedding. Guatemala’s civil war escalated in part after a devastating earthquake revealed just how inept and corrupt the government was. But 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.

The men, women, and children who rioted in the Bogside didn’t start Ireland’s civil war. The war was started by the radicals who created the Provisional Irish Republican Army. The founders of the paramilitary group, including Seán Mac Stíofáin, Seamus Twomey, and Joe Cahill, had met for decades before planning their first attack.

In the American Civil War, so-called Minute Men militias—who modeled themselves after the Revolutionary War–era patriots—began to crop up throughout the South as early as the 1830s, decades before the Civil War broke out. These militias were organized by small groups of radical secessionists, almost all of whom were white plantation owners, who wanted to build suppor...

According to one expert on the Basques, “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.

It’s never clear how a government is going to respond to sustained protests. Emotions run high, unexpected events occur. Intransigence and fear set in. People on both sides demand and seek revenge. That’s why the early acts of terror by members of a downgraded group are often more dangerous than people realize. Violence entrepreneurs are playing a bigger game. And in the early decades of the twenty-first century, these extremists who hope to provoke war have an extraordinarily powerful new weapon at their disposal. It’s cheap, it’s fast, it’s remarkably good at generating anger and resentment, and most people are not yet fully aware of its peril: social media.

One might think the move away from democracy would make these leaders unpopular, but by the time they consolidate power, they have successfully wielded their favorite means of communication—social media—to convince voters that anti-democratic measures are needed to preserve the country’s peace and their own prosperity.

SOCIAL MEDIA DOESN’T just drive countries down the democratic ladder. It also heightens the ethnic, social, religious, and geographic divisions that can be the first step in the creation of factions. This is, of course, because myth, emotion, and the politics of grievance—all of which drive factionalism—make for incredibly engaging content. Social media algorithms encourage this divisive content. They segregate people by design, driving those whose values or opinions differ into ever-diverging realities, tearing societies apart.

Social media is every ethnic entrepreneur’s dream. Algorithms, by pushing outrageous material, allow these nationalist extremists to shape people’s toxic views of “the other”—an ideal means of demonizing and targeting racial minorities, and creating division. Ethnic entrepreneurs use it to craft a common narrative, a story that people can get behind, and they encourage followers to go down the rabbit hole.

It used to be that far-right parties were unelectable in liberal democracies. But the story of fear and grievance told by ethnic entrepreneurs—the myths and losses of sons of the soil—prove irresistible to an audience made captive by social media. “Right-wing populism is always more engaging,” one Facebook executive has noted. According to the same executive, populism triggers reactions that are “incredibly strong” and “primitive” by appealing to emotionally charged subjects like “nation, protection, the other, anger, fear.”

People don’t realize how vulnerable Western democracies are to violent conflict. They have grown accustomed to their longevity, their resilience, and their stability in the face of crises. But that was before social media created an avenue by which enemies of democracy can easily infiltrate society and destabilize it from within. The internet has revealed just how fragile a government by and for the people can be.

Republicans are now in a state of desperate survival politics where they are playing to an increasingly rabid base just to hold on to their seats. Nowhere was this more evident than after the 2020 election, when Republican politicians openly supported—or tacitly approved—Trump’s claims of fraud, against all evidence.

Almost everyone who scored highest on a widely respected racial resentment measure voted for Trump in 2016, while almost everyone on the opposite end of the scale supported Hillary Clinton. Even after taking into account partisanship, whites’ resentment at Black gains and Black demands for equal rights had an oversized impact on the vote. According to one analysis, Republicans with high racial resentment scores were about 30 percent more likely to support Trump than their less aggrieved Republican peers. Perhaps most convincing are studies showing that attitudes on race strongly predict party defections. Those who are racially resentful today are especially likely to become Republicans tomorrow.

A movement turns to violence when all hope is lost. As the storming of the Capitol made clear, citizens on the right are not just resentful of their declining status, they now believe that the system is stacked against them. Everyone they trust—from Fox News to their senators—has told them so. In a poll conducted days after the Capitol siege, nearly three-quarters of likely Republican voters continued to doubt the presidential election results. Polls also revealed that 45 percent of Republicans supported the attack on the Capitol. And more than six months after the election, a majority of Republicans surveyed still claimed that the election had been stolen and that Donald Trump was the true president. The peaceful inauguration of President Biden did not change their views.

Americans across the political spectrum are becoming more accepting of violence as a means to achieve political goals, not less. Recent survey data show that 33 percent of Democrats and 36 percent of Republicans feel “somewhat justified” in using violence. In 2017, just 8 percent of people in both parties felt the same way. Another recent survey found that 20 percent of Republicans and 15 percent of Democrats say the United States would be better off if large numbers of the other party died. But when does sporadic violence escalate into civil war? How do you pinpoint the moment when hope is lost?

Most insurgencies, the report notes, “pass through similar stages of development during their life cycle.” In the pre-insurgency phase, a group begins to identify a set of common grievances and build a collective identity around a gripping narrative—the story or myth that helps them rally supporters and justify their actions. They begin to recruit members, some of whom even travel abroad for training. They begin to stockpile arms and supplies.

The United States probably entered the pre-insurgency phase in the early 1990s, with the formation of militias in the wake of the deadly standoffs at Ruby Ridge in Idaho—when federal agents killed right-wing activist Randy Weaver’s wife and son—and the fifty-one-day siege in Waco, Texas, which left eighty dead, including twenty-two children, after the Branch Davidians set fire to the compound as the FBI attempted to raid it. By the mid-1990s, militias were active in virtually all fifty states, peaking just after Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people in Oklahoma City in the deadliest domestic terror attack in U.S. history. The number of militias in the United States began to grow again in 2008, when Barack Obama was elected president. Prior to 2008, only about 43 militias existed; by 2011, there were 334.

Two of the most high-profile militias in the United States, the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters, were founded after Obama became president, out of the belief that the federal government was “working to destroy the liberties of Americans.” A more recent addition is the anti-immigrant, all-male Proud Boys. As of March 2021, ten people associated with the Oath Keepers have been arrested for helping to organize the January 6 siege of the Capitol. More troubling, members of all three organizations had been actively communicating in the lead-up to January 6, suggesting a possible alliance. According to JJ MacNab, one of the world’s experts on extremist organizations, “You have had distinct groups in the past—sovereign citizens, tax protesters, militia, survivalists, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters—and I think they are just becoming one big messy family right now.”

For the first time, violent right-wing groups increased their activity during a Republican administration. The president encouraged the more extreme voices among his supporters rather than seeking to calm or marginalize them. To these followers, Trump’s 2016 victory wasn’t the end of their fight; it was the beginning. As Trump put it in his first presidential debate against Democrat Joe Biden, they were to stand back and stand by. The second stage of insurgency, which the CIA calls the incipient conflict stage, is marked by discrete acts of violence.

The open insurgency stage, the final phase, according to the CIA’s report, is characterized by sustained violence as increasingly active extremists launch attacks that involve terrorism and guerrilla warfare, including assassinations and ambushes, as well as hit-and-run raids on police and military units. These groups also tend to use more sophisticated weapons, such as improvised explosive devices, and begin to attack vital infrastructure (such as hospitals, bridges, and schools), rather than just individuals.

growing support for extreme measures. 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.

In fact, the attack on the Capitol could well be the first of a series of organized attacks in an open insurgency stage. It targeted infrastructure. There were plans to assassinate certain politicians and attempts to coordinate activity. It also involved a large number of fighters, some of whom have combat experience. At least 14 percent of those arrested and charged are thought to have connections to the military or law enforcement.

We do not yet know whether the attack on the Capitol will be replicated or become part of a pattern. If it does, Americans will begin to feel unsafe, unprotected by their government. They will question who is in charge. Some will take advantage of the chaos to gain through violence what they couldn’t gain through conventional methods. That’s when we’ll know we’ve truly entered the open insurgency stage. For now, one thing is clear: America’s extremists are becoming more organized, more dangerous, and more determined, and they are not going away.

Terror can be effective in democracies because its targets—citizens—have political power: They can vote against politicians who are unable to stop the attacks. The Provisional IRA, Hamas, and the Tamil Tigers all believed that the more pain they inflicted on average citizens, the more likely governments would be to make concessions to the terrorists in exchange for peace. Either way, extremists benefit: They either convince the incumbent leader to pursue policies more favorable to the extremists (no gun control, stricter immigration policies), or they convince enough voters to elect a more extreme leader who is ideologically closer to them.

If America has a second civil war, the combatants will not gather in fields, nor will they wear uniforms. They may not even have commanders. They will slip in and out of the shadows, communicating on message boards and encrypted networks. They will meet in small groups in vacuum-repair shops along retail strips, in desert clearings along Arizona’s border, in public parks in Southern California, or in the snowy woods of Michigan, where they will train to fight. 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.

The Turner Diaries has directly inspired far-right terrorism. Pages from the book were found in Timothy McVeigh’s truck after his attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Both Patrick Crusius, the alleged El Paso Walmart gunman, and John Timothy Earnest, accused of shooting up a synagogue in Poway, California, echoed ideas from the book in their manifestos. And the influence of the book was evident during the Capitol insurrection. It describes bombing FBI headquarters, attacking the Capitol building, and instituting “the Day of the Rope,” in which “race traitors”—including politicians, lawyers, TV newscasters, judges, teachers, and preachers—are strung up on a gallows. In one video from January 6, 2021, a Proud Boy can be seen telling a journalist to read The Turner Diaries.

The first two stages are known as “classification” and “symbolization.” This is when an identity group in power begins to highlight differences among a country’s citizens, categorizing them by groups—as Belgian colonizers in Rwanda did when they created identity cards for the previously indistinguishable Tutsis and Hutus—and then adopting certain markers for themselves or others (as the Nazis did when they appropriated swastikas and forced Jews to wear yellow stars of David on their clothing). Already, the United States has moved through both of these stages. Consider our deep ideological divide: We have classified ourselves by race, geography, and beliefs. Members of America’s far-right faction have appropriated symbols—think of the now ubiquitous Confederate flag, the orange hats of the Proud Boys, or even the Hawaiian shirts flaunted by extremists in Charlottesville or at the Capitol. And members of both parties have proposed issuing national ID cards that would be synced to a government database.

Stage three is “discrimination,” which is when a dominant group denies or suppresses the rights of others by means of law or custom—as the Buddhist majority did in Myanmar, stripping the Rohingya of voting rights, jobs, and citizenship. Stage four, or “dehumanization,” easily follows: Those in power use public discourse to turn regular citizens against the targeted minority, denigrating them as criminals (as Serbs did with Bosniaks) or subhuman (as when Hutus called Tutsis “cockroaches”).

“Organization,” the fifth stage, comes next. This is where a dominant group begins to assemble an army or militia and formulate plans to eradicate other groups.

This is where the United States is today: solidly in stage five, perhaps entering stage six. Militias, which exploded under Obama, have been increasingly organizing, training, and arming themselves. Stewart Rhodes, an army veteran and Yale Law School graduate, founded the Oath Keepers in 2009, and has been talking about civil war ever since.

AMERICA’S EXTREMISTS TODAY subscribe to an idea known as accelerationism: the apocalyptic belief that modern society is irredeemable and that its end must be hastened, so that a new order can be brought into being. In a way, it’s their language for pushing the country up the insurgency scale and perhaps also toward ethnic cleansing. Adherents believe that they are not making enough progress through regular means—rallies, election of right-wing politicians—and as a result must precipitate the change through violence. As the terrorism expert JJ MacNab has explained, they are looking for any excuse, from COVID lockdowns to protests for racial justice, to incite conflict.

The hope is that this will set off a chain reaction of violence, which will, in turn, cause moderate citizens—their eyes now open to government oppression and social injustice—to join their cause. MacNab even sees a possibility of far-right extremists joining with the far left: “Some of the groups that are traditionally left-wing extremist, I think, have realized that they are in the same boat. They are equally unhappy. They feel disenfranchised. They do not have any control over their lives, the government, or anything else. This is their way of acting out.”

Another terror strategy is known as “outbidding.” This tactic is used when one militant group competes with other groups to cement its dominance.

We have not yet seen the outbidding strategy take hold in the United States, but it’s easy to imagine it as right-wing groups proliferate. What ISIS did in Iraq and Syria provides a blueprint: The group invested heavily in internet propaganda, advertising its military strength and publicizing both the brutal acts it was willing to commit and the public services it was willing to provide to local populations. When it entered a town, it quickly targeted leaders of the opposition. If this was to occur in the United States, you would see one extreme group, such as Atomwaffen, escalating to ever-more brutal acts of violence, to prove that it was stronger, more capable, and more dedicated to the cause than other groups.

During the Nuremberg trials, Hermann Göring was interviewed by a young American psychologist, Gustave Gilbert, who told Göring that he didn’t think the average person wanted to be dragged into war. Göring responded: “Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece?…It is always a simple matter to drag the people along….All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and [for] exposing the country to greater danger.”

An armed population increases the likelihood of this kind of security dilemma. U.S. gun sales hit an all-time high in 2020, with seventeen million firearms sold between January and October. Buyers were primarily conservatives, who tend to buy guns in response to Democratic electoral gains (16.6 million firearms were sold in 2016, driven by the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, who advocated strong gun control legislation). But it is also the greatest number of guns sold in any single year in America’s history, according to the chief economist of Small Arms Analytics.