More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
December 13 - December 28, 2022
He was angry at the Democratic leaders who had let this happen; he often tweeted about Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi to let off steam.
They considered storming the state capitol—they could take lawmakers hostage, then execute them over the course of a few days. They also considered locking the doors of the capitol and setting the building on fire with everyone inside. Eventually, because the capitol was so well protected, they settled on a different plan: kidnap Whitmer at her vacation home in northern Michigan sometime before the November 2020 election.
The time had come for a revolution, and he and his men would provoke a societal collapse. “I just wanna make the world glow, dude,” he told an informant. “That’s what it’s gonna take for us to take it back.”
As a scholar and an expert on civil wars,
The biggest data collection project is now housed at Uppsala University, in Sweden. It was built in collaboration with the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, Norway (PRIO), and has been funded over the years by the Swedish Research Council, the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, the Norwegian government, and the World Bank.
how civil wars start, how long they last, how many people die, and why they fight.
Political Instability Task Force (PITF),
But as I did this work, I realized something unnerving: The warning signs of instability that we have identified in other places are the same signs that, over the past decade, I’ve begun to see on our own soil. This is why I witnessed the events in Lansing—as well as the assault on the U.S. Capitol in January 2021—with such trepidation. I’ve seen how civil wars start, and I know the signs that people miss. And I can see those signs emerging here at a surprisingly fast rate.
Today, civil wars are waged primarily by different ethnic and religious groups, by guerrilla soldiers and militias, who often target civilians. The unrest in Michigan, if you look closely, features these very elements.
Two of its major cities, Detroit and Flint, are predominantly African American, while its rural areas are 95 percent white. Economic decline in the state has created deep personal discontent, especially among its rural residents, which has led to anger, resentment, and radicalization.
The era of a single, regimented, and hierarchical fighting force in official military uniform using conventional weapons is over.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, masterminded the use of suicide bombings to kill anyone cooperating with the Shia-controlled government during Iraq’s civil war.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, perfected the use of massive car bombs to attack the same government.
TO UNDERSTAND HOW close modern America is to erupting into conflict, we must acquaint ourselves with the conditions that give rise to, and define, modern civil war.
or the politicization of face masks in the middle of a global pandemic.
Since 2008, over 70 percent of extremist-related deaths in the United States have been at the hands of people connected to far-right or white-supremacist movements.
bumper stickers like the circle of stars around the Roman numeral III, the Valknot, and the Celtic Cross are not innocent. Instead, they are symbols of America’s far-right militant groups, which are becoming increasingly visible, vocal, and dangerous.
At age thirteen, she had seen her country’s leader, Saddam Hussein, condemn U.S. president George W. Bush on TV for threatening war and had heard her family talking around the dinner table about a possible American invasion. Noor was a typical teenager. She loved Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys and Christina Aguilera. She would watch Oprah and Dr. Phil in her free time, and one of her favorite films was The Matrix. She couldn’t imagine U.S. soldiers in Baghdad—where life, though sometimes hard, had mainly been about hanging out with friends, walking to the park, and visiting her
...more
The soldiers smiled back, eager to talk to anyone who was willing. “Everybody was so happy,” Noor recalled. “There was suddenly freedom.”
When Saddam Hussein was captured, researchers who study democratization didn’t celebrate. We knew that democratization, especially rapid democratization in a deeply divided country, could be highly destabilizing. In fact, the more radical and rapid the change, the more destabilizing it was likely to be. The United States and the United Kingdom thought they were delivering freedom to a welcoming population. Instead, they were about to deliver the perfect conditions for civil war.
Suddenly, before a new government could be formed, tens of thousands of Baath bureaucrats were thrown out of power. More than 350,000 officers and soldiers in the Iraqi military no longer had an income. More than 85,000 regular Iraqis, including schoolteachers who had joined the Baath Party as a condition of their employment, lost their jobs. Noor, who is Sunni, remembers the feeling of shock around the country.
They found easy recruits in Sunni cities and Iraq’s Sunni-dominated countryside where citizens increasingly felt politically and economically aggrieved. As one Sunni citizen noted, “We were on top of the system. We had dreams. Now we are the losers. We lost our positions, our status, the security of our families, stability.”
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.
pseudo-autocratic middle zone.
Hungary became a full democracy in 1990 before Prime Minister Viktor Orbán slowly and methodically nudged it back toward dictatorship.
Experts call countries in this middle zone “anocracies”—they are neither full autocracies nor democracies but something in between.
United States—all
To everyone’s surprise, they found that the best predictor of instability was not, as they might have guessed, income inequality or poverty. It was a nation’s polity index score, with the anocracy zone being the place of greatest danger.
Anocracies, particularly those with more democratic than autocratic features—what the task force called “partial democracies”—were twice as likely as autocracies to experience political instability or civil war, and three times as likely as democracies.
A government that is democratizing is weak compared to the regime before it—politically, institutionally, and militarily.
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.
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 elites, setting a conciliatory tone and providing them with opportunities to gracefully relinquish power. The result is often less violence.
Even once-safe liberal democracies, such as Belgium and the United Kingdom, saw their polity index scores lowered. Since 2000, democratic leaders who came to power via elections have begun to consolidate authoritarian rule. Civil war experts are once again worried. We understand that backsliding almost certainly means that the middle zone is likely to expand.
Poland, where the Law and Justice Party won elections in 2015; the president, prime minister, and deputy prime minister have since systematically taken control of the courts, restricted free speech, targeted political opponents, and weakened the electoral commission.
The government controls the media, imposes Kafkaesque regulations on pro-democracy parties, and moves forcefully to silence voices of dissent. Orbán and his party may have won the national vote in 2018, but international monitors
including Brazil, India, and the United States.
Would-be autocrats such as Orbán, Erdoğan, Vladimir Putin, or Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro put their political goals ahead of the needs of a healthy democracy, gaining support by exploiting citizen fears—over jobs, over immigration, over security.
They persuade citizens that democracy as it has existed will lead to more corruption, more lies, and greater bungling of economic and social policy. They decry political leaders’ compromises as ineffective, and the government as a failure. They understand that if they can persuade citizens that “strong leadership” and “law and order” are necessary, citizens will voluntarily vote them into office. People will often sacrifice freedom if they believe it will make them more secure. Then, once in power, these leaders plunge their countries into anocracy by exploiting weaknesses in the constitution,
...more
For a decaying democracy, the risk of civil war increases almost the moment it becomes less democratic. As a democracy drops down the polity index scale—a result of fewer executive restraints, weaker rule of law, diminished voting rights—its risk for armed conflict steadily increases. This risk peaks when it hits a score of between +1 to −1—the point when citizens face the prospect of real autocracy. The chance of civil war then sharply drops if the country weathers this moment by becoming even more authoritarian, or changes course and begins to rebuild its democracy.
But soon Ukrainian volunteers, like the ones who had shown up at the recruitment headquarters, formed a sort of paramilitary force. By June, clashes turned into conventional battles, as Russia quickly supplied the separatists with heavy weapons and tanks. “It went very, very fast,” said Minakov.
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.
Others have evaded civil war by using a gradual, sneakier hand, like Putin in Russia or Orbán in Hungary. These leaders maintain the guise of democracy—elections and limited individual freedoms—and cement their popularity with effective propaganda, control of the media, and sometimes xenophobia. Citizens, rather than revolt, have acquiesced to their rule.
“People began asking whether you were Shia or Sunni,” she said.
During World War II, a Croatian ultranationalist, fascist, terrorist organization—the Ustashe—sided with the Germans and were allowed to rule Croatia as a result.
In the first five years after World War II, 53 percent of civil wars were fought between ethnic factions, according to a dataset compiled by James Fearon and David Laitin, two civil war experts at Stanford University.
“factionalism.” 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.
Countries that are considered “factionalized” have identity-based political parties that are often intransigent and inflexible.
These parties can also be personalistic in nature, revolving around a dominant figure who often appeals to ethnic or religious nationalism to gain and then maintain power. A coherent policy platform is often absent.
Experts assess the level of factionalism in a country based on a five-point scale that goes from a fully competitive political system (5) to a fully repressed system (1). Factional systems receive a rating of 3. (A country’s factionalism score tracks with its polity index score; as a nation becomes less politically competitive, it also becomes less democratic.)
