Is America Primed for Civil War? A Conversation with Barbara Walter

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I'm pleased to bring you this interview with Barbara F. Walter, who is the Rohr Professor of International Relations at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego. A life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Walter helps to run the award-winning blog Political Violence at a Glance and has written for The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Reuters, and Foreign Affairs. Her most recent book, How Civil Wars Start. And How To Stop Them, was published yesterday. Our conversation took place on December 21, 2021, and has been edited for clarity and flow.  

Courtesy of Barbara Walter

Ruth Ben-Ghiat (RBG): One of the important things about your book is the emphasis on the start of civil wars and the process of entering into a state of war. Can you talk about arriving at a point of being on the verge of civil war, and some of the signs that a political and social atmosphere conducive to a civil war has developed in a country?

Barbara Walter (BW): Most people think that civil wars just explode, but it often takes years for these things to build. And the individuals who are often the behind-the-scenes instigators of such conflicts sometimes have been organizing for decades. What we know is if you look across over the last 80 years, at all of the civil wars that have broken out, they do tend to follow a pattern.

The CIA put together a Political Instability Task Force, which brings academics and data analysts together to predict where, around the world, outside the United States, civil wars and political violence were likely to break out. We brainstormed about all the possible variables that could have an effect, like poverty, income inequality, and the ethnic heterogeneity of a country.

But it turns out that the two biggest predictors were first, something that political scientists call "anocracy," which is a fancy term for governments that are neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic, and second, whether a country was ethnically, religiously or racially factionalized. Meaning whether ethnic entrepreneurs, usually politicians, began to exploit ethnic, racial or religious differences in a society for their own political purposes.

RBG: How important are propaganda tactics in creating the right climate for people to feel that slaughtering their own neighbors and associates is necessary?

BW: Propaganda is enormously important, especially in the hands of ethnic entrepreneurs like Donald Trump or Slobodan Milošević who spread messages of fear, insecurity, and imminent threat. Milošević acted in the pre-Internet age, but told Serbs over and over that if they didn't protect themselves from Croatia and Bosnia they would be destroyed. I have a chapter in the book about how social media has acted as an accelerant, not only for the decline of democracy, but for the rise of hatred and ethnic factionalism here in the United States.

RBG: Yes, polarization is just the start, what you need is to get people into a survivalist mentality.

BW: There's been a fair number of studies that look at what convinces your average person to kill somebody, their neighbor, for example. One of them is greed. Your neighbor had something that you wanted and it you're suddenly living in a situation of anarchy where the government is weak or collapsing, and you can get away with taking something from your neighbor, some people will turn to violence.

There's also the motive of revenge. If you're in a situation where the government is weak and you're angry at somebody for having done an injustice to you, you might use violence against them if you think you can get away with it.

This explains some of these situations where suddenly you have societies breaking down and turning on themselves. A classic case would be Rwanda, where the Hutus suddenly slaughtered the Tutsis.  How did this happen? We now know that when people fear for their lives, when they feel as if they and their families could be under attack, they will go on the attack themselves.

If you have a highly armed society, it becomes easier to do significant damage in a short amount of time. Of course, this also ratchets up the level of threat. If you know that your neighbors all have guns and you don't, and you can't count on the government to protect you, what do you do? You go out and buy guns and you start to defend your home.

And you can imagine all the ways this could spiral out of control and create a situation where people are suddenly fighting each other over a false threat, over a manufactured threat that was really created to help one particular group grab power during a time of weakness.

RBG: Americans purchased more than 18 million guns in 2021, so we certainly check that box. Yet many Americans are not prepared to make the leap to see their country as a candidate for authoritarianism.

BW: One of the problems is that Americans see governments as either democracies or authoritarian regimes. And the reality is, as you know, there's so much in between. There's this third category that people need to understand. Singapore is a democracy: it holds elections, and yet the same party always wins. So, there's no competition in terms of who's running for office.

Americans like to think of their government as not only democratic, but as a beacon for the rest of the democratic world. And that is just no longer true. The Republicans have been whittling away at the institutions of our democracy. Americans need to understand that we are now in an anocracy — in a middle zone between democracy and autocracy— and it's in that middle zone where most civil wars tend to occur.

RBG: So, what can people do? You write in your book that failed protests can lead to a loss of hope. Well, we had very successful protests in 2020 America, and they gave momentum to the record voter turnout that led to Donald Trump's defeat.

BW: The most important thing that Americans can do is vote. Something like 80 million Americans didn't vote in the last election. The reality is if everyone voted, we would have far different outcomes and we would have a situation where political reform could be possible.

When people like me who study civil wars are asked what can we do to prevent civil war? The number one thing is to invest in better democracy, strengthen your democratic institutions. The most democratic countries in the world don't experience civil war. They just don't. The United States needs to reform its democracy. It needs to enhance the checks and balances on the executive branch.

And it especially needs to guarantee that every citizen has a right to vote and has a voice. Those reforms aren't going to happen if a large percentage of American citizens choose not to vote. So the number one thing for me would be go out and spend the time knocking on doors, getting people out to vote. That would radically change the makeup of our government.

RBG: I also think it's time to let business and financial elites know that civil war will be very bad for business. They have more leverage than other sectors of society.

BW: The last chapter in my book starts with the story of South Africa, which is exactly this. Back in the 1980s, if you asked people who studied civil war what country would most likely to experience this in the near future, everybody said South Africa. It almost seemed like a preordained conclusion. The apartheid regime was becoming more brutal, and it just looked like there was no coming back from this abyss.

And then [President of South Africa Frederik Willem] De Klerk came into power and he negotiated with the Black majority and Nelson Mandela was let out of prison. Why did the apartheid regime shift? It was largely because of the business community.

This was one of those cases where economic sanctions really worked The United States, the EU and Japan were the three main trading partners with South Africa, and so South African businesses were getting strangled. The business leaders who had benefited from the apartheid regime realized that it was unsustainable over time. They chose to basically hand over majority controls to the Black population in order to assure continued profits in the future. That's a really great case.