How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them

by Barbara F. Walter

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.

“We studied every situation of factionalism and I’m completely convinced that [this is] the strongest variable outside of anocracy.” 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.

The groups that are competing are often about the same size. In fact, it’s this balance of power between the two groups that creates such fierce rivalry; the stakes of winning or losing are high. These parties can also be personalistic in nature, revolving around a dominant figure who often appeals to ethnic or religious na...

If citizens come to believe there is a chance, no matter how small, that the opposition could destroy them, they will turn to a leader who offers them protection, no matter how unscrupulous.

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. Ethnonationalist leaders have risen to pull citizens away from secular social ideals toward identity politics.

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.

The Serbs initiated violence in Croatia and then Bosnia because they understood that they would lose significant power if both regions were allowed to secede. The Sunnis started the war in Iraq because they, too, had lost power after the American invasion. The Moro people, the Serbs, the Sunnis—all of them were downgraded, and all of them turned to violence.

Human beings hate to lose. They hate to lose money, games, jobs, respect, partners, and, yes, status. The psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky demonstrated this in a series of experiments in which they asked subjects if they would be willing to accept a gamble where they had a 50 percent chance of winning, say, $100, but an equal chance of losing $100. They found that most people refuse the gamble. The reason? Human beings are loss averse. They are much more motivated to try to reclaim losses than they are to try to make gains.

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.

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.