How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them

by Barbara F. Walter

A painful reality of democratization is that the faster and bolder the reform efforts, the greater the chance of civil war. Rapid regime change—a six-point or more fluctuation in a country’s polity index score—almost always precedes instability, and civil wars are more likely to break out in the first two years after reform is attempted.

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.

WAR IS EVEN more likely, the experts found, if at least one faction in a country becomes a superfaction: a group whose members share not only the same ethnic or racial identity but also the same religion, class, and geographic location. In fact, war was almost twelve times more likely than if a group was more heterogeneous.

What was remarkable about the attack was not just the fierceness of the ethnic rivalry between Croats and Serbs. 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. Cities are increasingly places of diversity, while rural areas are not. Urban areas are also increasingly younger, more liberal, more educated, and less religious. This divide is likely to only get worse, as more lucrative and dynamic industries—from finance and tech to entertainment—become more concentrated in cities. As younger people abandon rural communities, these communities will increasingly become dominated by less-educated manual laborers who often compete with new immigrants and who feel looked down upon

Though the term “ethnic cleansing” would not become widely used until the Bosnian civil war several months later, it had already become a means to control and change the demographics and identity of an entire region.

Over the past three decades, scholars have zeroed in on an answer, drawing on several large datasets on nearly a century of civil wars. 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.

In the twenty-first century, the most dangerous factions are once-dominant groups facing decline.

In democracies, sons of the soil groups are most commonly downgraded by simple demographics—some combination of migration and differences in birth rates. Democratic elections are ultimately head counts, and, as Donald Horowitz observed, “numbers are an indicator of whose country it is.”

Modernization, the process by which rural, traditional societies are transformed into urban secular ones, favors citizens with the education and skills to compete in a mechanized world. Globalization has shifted manufacturing jobs to less developed countries while benefiting service-oriented workers (who happen to be disproportionately women). Sons of the soil tend to be disproportionately affected by these tectonic shifts: They frequently live in rural areas, far from a country’s economic, cultural, and political centers. They also tend to be poorer and less educated, and so more vulnerable to competition. The advantage they originally had—of being first on the land—not only disappears; it becomes a handicap. As the world moves on without them, they feel forgotten and ignored.

Climate change will likely lead to a greater number of natural disasters that will disproportionately affect poorer, rural groups and create economic crises. It is during these times that citizens will feel the pain of discriminatory political and economic policies and inept governments most acutely.

Between 1980 and 2010, conflicts in almost a quarter of these countries coincided with climatic calamities that acted as threat multipliers. If a country was already at risk of civil war, natural disasters tended to make things worse. In a world where drought, wildfire, hurricanes, and heat waves will be more frequent and more intense—driving greater migration—the downgraded will have even more reasons to rise up.

CATHOLICS DIDN’T WANT war. They had peacefully protested for decades to try to gain fair political representation and equal treatment in Northern Ireland. They had written letters, formed civil rights associations, and demonstrated in the street. They had held open-air meetings, sit-ins, and at one point in 1968 occupied Northern Ireland’s parliament in Belfast. In January 1969, they had organized a “Long March” from Belfast to Derry modeled on the march from Selma to Montgomery in the United States. But Protestants, through it all, had shown no interest in compromise. Nothing changed.

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.

V-Dem, the Swedish research institute, collects detailed data on the different types of democracies around the world and then rates them on a 100-point scale with 100 being the most democratic and 0 being the least. According to the institute, Spain has suffered one of the worst declines in Western Europe, followed by Greece, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Austria. Nordic countries, the most liberal in the world, have also dropped since 2010: Denmark, the number one ranked democracy for most of the past hundred years, has been downgraded 10 points on V-Dem’s scale; Sweden has been downgraded 35. The swift rate of democratic decay around the world has been so rapid that V-Dem issued its first “Autocratization Alert” in 2020.

It’s 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. The radically new information environment in which we live is perhaps the single biggest cultural and technological change the world has seen in this century. Facebook was initially hailed as a great tool of democratization. It would connect people, encourage the free exchange of ideas and opinions, and allow news to be curated by citizens themselves rather than major news outlets. It seemed like the perfect tool to put power in the hands of the people. Dissidents had a new way to organize and communicate, which promised to usher in a new era of freedom and reform. Facebook became the world’s most popular platform in 2009. By 2010, YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram were all popular and growing. By 2013, 23 percent of Americans received at least some of their news from social media. By 2016, over 62 percent of Americans did. Today it’s over 70 percent.

Open, unregulated social media platforms turned out to be the perfect accelerant for the conditions that lead to civil war.

One study found that YouTube viewers who consume the kind of “mild” right-wing content created by provocative talk show host Joe Rogan, whose audience in 2020 was 286 million, are often pulled into much more radical alt-right content. The study concluded that YouTube is “a radicalization pipeline.” It’s this business model of engagement that makes social media so terrifying to those of us who study civil wars. The current model doesn’t care if the information it disseminates is true or not, just that it is all-absorbing.

In 2018, Facebook finally admitted that it had contributed to community violence in Myanmar after a series of high-profile reports and stories directly connected the platform to the 2017 genocide. CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised to do everything in the company’s power to stop the flow of hate speech and misinformation. The company hired three Burmese-speaking representatives, who ultimately removed 484 pages, 157 accounts, and 17 groups. Most activists and human rights groups felt this was grossly inadequate.

According to a 2017 report by Freedom House, disinformation campaigns influenced elections in at least seventeen countries that year.

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.

The world saw the organizing power of social media with the rise of the Islamic State, which has used websites, chat rooms, and sites like Twitter to disseminate propaganda that radicalizes individuals in the comfort of their living rooms. It has convinced at least thirty thousand citizens from about one hundred different countries to join its battle in Syria.

Ultimately, it’s the algorithms of social media that serve as accelerants for violence. By promoting a sense of perpetual crisis, these algorithms give rise to a growing sense of despair. Disinformation spread by extremists discredits peaceful protesters, convinces citizens that counterattacks by opposition groups are likely, and creates a sense—often a false sense—that moderates within their own movement are not doing enough to protect the population, or are ineffective and weak compared to the opposition. It’s at this point that violence breaks out: when citizens become convinced that there is no hope of fixing their problems through conventional means.

No one wants to believe that their beloved democracy is in decline, or headed toward war; the decay is often so incremental that people often fail to notice or understand it, even as they’re experiencing it. 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 dangerous territory.

Right-wing terrorism used to rise and fall depending on who was president: It decreased when a Republican was in the White House and increased when a Democrat was in power. President Trump broke the pattern. 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.

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.

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).

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”).

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.

Some in the group found Charlottesville—and the subsequent arrests, deplatforming, and bad press—to be disheartening, proof that Mason had been right all along: They would not be successful if they stayed within the bounds of the law. As one former AWD member later told investigative journalist A. C. Thompson (who made the ProPublica documentary), Charlottesville sparked the group’s shift toward violence, because members felt their efforts had been ineffectual. “Huge rallies don’t work,” he explained. “All that happens is people get arrested, people lose jobs, and you get put on some FBI watch list.” The answer, he continued, was to go underground, and to pursue a form of cell-style terrorism known as “leaderless resistance.”

Mexican drug cartels pursued this strategy against the judges and police officers who refused to be bribed into turning a blind eye to the lucrative drug trade. Once headless bodies began appearing in the streets of Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana, government agents became much more hesitant to enforce the law, and drug cartels and their leaders had freer reign.

We’ve already seen this kind of strategy in the United States. Intimidation was the preferred tactic of the Ku Klux Klan, which responded to the federal government’s expansion of civil rights by turning to violence and murder to suppress the Black vote, win control of state legislatures, and enforce white supremacy in the South.

Still, the specter of left-wing radicals flexing their muscle will be what right-wing extremists invoke—to stoke fear and, ultimately, justify their own violence. It will be the evidence they use to gain even more support for their movement. Trump already set the example when he and his national security team insisted that the main domestic terror threat in the United States came from antifa, devoting resources to eradicating leftist groups while ignoring those on the far right. That the left is violent and filled with terrorists is a useful narrative of fear—it creates a common enemy and supports the idea of self-defense.

Faith in government has plummeted: From 1964 to 2019, the share of Americans who trust those in Washington to do “what is right” tumbled from 77 percent to 17 percent. Americans are also losing faith in one another: The percentage of Americans who don’t have confidence in the electorate to make good political decisions has grown from 35 percent in 1997 to 59 percent today.

The U.S. government could also increase bipartisanship—and help avert conflict—by reexamining the electoral college system, which is, in its own way, a form of political gerrymandering. The American system is structured to exacerbate the urban-rural divide by giving small states disproportionate power in the Senate. 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. To prevent this, the federal government should close fundraising loopholes for candidates and officeholders, as Canada and other countries have done, and reinstate campaign finance rules.

Today, Americans are distrustful of their government. They believe, quite rightly, that their democratic institutions often don’t serve the people’s interests. The solution is not to abandon democracy but rather to improve it. America needs to reform its government to make it more transparent, more accountable to voters, and more equitable and inclusive of all citizens. Rather than manipulate institutions to serve a narrower and narrower group of citizens and corporate interests, the United States needs to reverse course, amplifying citizens’ voices, increasing government accountability, improving public services, and eradicating corruption. We need to make sure that all Americans are allowed to vote, that all votes count, and that, in turn, those votes influence which policies are enacted in Washington. Americans are going to regain trust in their government only when it becomes clear that it is serving them rather than lobbyists, billionaires, and a declining group of rural voters.

A 2009 report from the Department of Homeland Security observed that “right-wing extremism” was on the rise. The team behind the report, led by Daryl Johnson, had begun to scour extremist websites and message boards in 2007 and were surprised by what they found: bomb-making manuals, weapons training, and hundreds of militia-recruitment videos (on YouTube). Johnson’s report suggested that veterans might be especially susceptible to recruitment, based on a 2008 FBI assessment that found that more than two hundred individuals with military experience had joined white-supremacist organizations since the 9/11 attacks. The report, however, led to an outcry among congressional Republicans and veterans groups, and the DHS was pressured to withdraw it.

A follow-up report, in 2015, found that right-wing and anti-government “domestic terrorists” appeared to be using contacts in law enforcement to access intelligence and avoid detection.

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.” If America does not change its current course, dangers loom.

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 Americans live their lives “one small step from catastrophe,” and that makes them ready recruits for militants. Investing in real political reform and economic security would make it much harder for white nationalists to gain sympathizers and would prevent the rise of a new generation of far-right extremists.

Governments that work to show they’re effective receive an added benefit. Not only do they make it harder for extremists to radicalize moderates, they also undercut the ability of extremists to step in and compete with the state to offer services. Hamas’s popularity was built on the benefits it provided to Palestinians who were being neglected by the Israeli government, not on the attacks it launched against Israeli civilians. On some level, the support of the population comes down to who can provide the best services and the most protection.

California is another successful example. Since becoming minority-white in 1998 (Texas followed in 2004), the state has seen its economy grow by 200 percent. Unemployment has dropped by almost 3 percent. GDP per capita in the state has increased by 52.5 percent. I moved to California in 1996. I live forty miles north of the Mexican border and teach on a campus that is only 21 percent white. Every day I see a vision of a more promising future: eager students, hardworking immigrants. California’s transition met fierce resistance. In 1994, the state passed Proposition 187, the so-called Save Our State measure, prohibiting undocumented immigrants from receiving public services like healthcare and education. The referendum made the state the first in the modern era to approve major legislation aimed at deterring immigration and punishing the undocumented. Governor Pete Wilson, a Republican, handily won reelection by campaigning in favor of Prop 187, running ads showing grainy footage of immigrants crossing the border en masse. He was California’s version of an ethnic entrepreneur. His play to white fear, which included harsher criminal justice policies, was a winning strategy. The greater the minority population—the greater the threat to white supremacy—the greater the white backlash. But all of that began to change when California became a majority-minority state. As the minority population amassed enough support to wield political power, the state began to embrace its diversi...