14 saturday review Saturday January 1 2022 | the timesHow Civil
Wa r s S t a r t
And How to
Stop Them
by Barbara F WalterViking, 294pp; £18.99I
t turns out that there is a discipline that
you might call “civilwarology” — the
study of the factors that lead to civil
war. It exists in think tanks and univer-
sities, and its experts are consulted by
state agencies anxious to better under-
stand the world in which they operate.
Barbara F Walter became a civilwarologist
nearly a quarter of a century ago and her
entry is evidently well thumbed in the
Rolodexes of the CIA and the US State
Department. In other words, she knows
what she’s talking about — which makes
this book rather scary.
The discipline is based on observation
and measurement over time. Out of these
have emerged a series of data sets and
analytical tools relating to the progression
towards or away from the conditions likely
to lead to civil war. And it adds a word to
the list of possible -ocracies.
Anocracy, disappointingly, is not gov-
ernment by assholes, but a troubling
middle point between democracy and
autocracy. An anocracy may exist during
the transition from authoritarianism to
full democracy, or the other way round,
but it is less stable than either. Right now
some states that lay claim to being democ-
racies are in fact anocracies.
If anocracy is a key pre-condition for the
outbreak of a civil war, “factionalisation”,
Walter says, is another. Not to be confused
with polarisation, this is “when citizens
form groups based on ethnic, religious or
geographic distinctions — and a country’s
political parties become predatory, cutting
out rivals and enacting policies that
primarily benefit them and their consti-
tuents”. Winner takes all. Or loser loses all.
The postwar conflict that features most
prominently in this book happened in the
territories that had once been Yugoslavia.
For 35 years the communist autocrat
Marshal Tito had suppressed any latent
ethnic rivalry between a series of closely
related peoples. When he died in 1980 this
settlement died with him. As the compo-
nent republics of the old state began to
agitate for more autonomy, one group —
the Serbs — saw themselves as losing out.
This sense of loss on the part of a large
group, Walter says, is a significant element
in creating the conditions for war. She
reminds us that the election of Abraham
Lincoln as US president in 1860 meant
slaveholding Southern states no longer
exercised a veto on federal policy; the
other states could outvote them.books
Is the second US Civil War brewing?
David Aaronovitch
is alarmed by this
lucid study that
shows all the signs of
conflict are there...
In Yugoslavia the new anocracy opened
the way for what experts call “ethnic entre-
preneurs” — a breed of politician that
mobilises around ethnic grievances or
anxieties. These included most notably
Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia, Franjo
Tudjman in Croatia and Radovan Karadzic
for the Bosnian Serbs. At a more local level
ethnic politics became exploited by “vio-
lence entrepreneurs” — the men who
formed and armed militias to take control
and to kill their enemies. These militias do
not need to be large. In the town of
Visegrad one man with 15 gang and family
members carried out a local genocide of
Bosnian Muslims.
A common dimension in civil war devel-
opment, Walter tells us, is a rural/urban
divide, in which resentful “sons of the soil”,
organising away from the supervision of
the authorities, see themselves at cultural
war with the more cosmopolitan town-
dwellers. In Bosnia this was embodied in
the bloody four-year siege of Sarajevo,
with the Serb hicks from the hills mortar-
ing and sniping the occupants of the city.
One of Walter’s reasons for reminding
us of the horrors of the former Yugoslavia
is to point out that to the population of
these lands, civil war had never seemed
likely until it happened and suddenly, one
day, their good neighbours turned into
their executioners.
And here we come to the nub of it. The
title of the book is misleading. It isn’t really
about civil wars generically, but about one
conceivable conflict in particular: the
Second American Civil War. Roughly at
the halfway point, having established how
fratricidal conflict occurs, Walter turns
her attention fully to her own country.
Naturally, she knows how absurd such a
possibility will seem to many readers as
they take the subway to their downtownSCOTT OLSEN/GETTY IMAGESoffices or listen to the audiobook as they
drive the children to school.
“No one wants to believe,” she writes,
“that their beloved democracy is in decline,
or headed toward war; the decay is often so
incremental that people often fail to notice
it or understand it, even as they’re experi-
encing it.” Yet objectively the danger signs
are there. So that “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 check-
list, 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 very dangerous territory.”
My psychological disposition inclines
me against claims such as these. In the
Great Journalistic Division between the
hysterics and the phlegmatists, I tend to
side with the latter. But watching happen-
ings in the US since 2016 — and especially
the events of the past two years — have
shaken my complacency.
There has been the loss of conventional
politics from much of the national dis-
course, so that sharp political difference no
longer concerns taxes or the environment,
but (for one side at least) is almost entirely
about ethnicity, identity, culture and loss.
The Kyle Rittenhouse court case arose
from armed men stalking the ungoverned
streets shooting at each other in pursuit of
political not criminal objectives. Militias
line statehouse steps openly carrying
weapons of civil war lethality.
Then there was January 6, 2021, and the
storming of the Capitol, in which political
thugs sought to prevent the accession of
a democratically elected president. Even
more alarming than the mere fact of
this act of what the CIA classified as “openinsurgency” has been the way the Republi-
can Party and its supporters have mini-
mised this attempt at insurrection.
Walter shows how developments in the
US match the conditions for other civil
wars. The sense of loss among many
white-identifying voters (the US as a
whole will follow where California and
Texas have led by becoming minority
white by 2045), the rural-urban divide,
a failure of trust in politicians and other
citizens, the factionalisation of politics,
the rise of grievance-exploiting “ethnic
entrepreneurs” (in this case most obvi-
ously Donald Trump), and all of this
hugely exacerbated by the catalyst of that
great creator of anxiety, social media.
The psychological fuel for civil war,
Walter reminds us, is not hate, but fear.
Between January and October 2020
a record 17 million firearms were sold in
the US. In December 2020 one poll
showed that 17 per cent of respondents
agreed with the statement: “A group of
Satan-worshiping elites who run a child
sex ring are trying to control our politics.”
Walter admits that in light of all this she
and her husband, children of European
migrants to the US, considered leaving the
US last year. A useful rule of thumb could
be that when your experts on civil strife
start moving abroad you may be in trouble.
Yet for all that, Walter is not fatalistic. If
the forces of division have a playbook, then,
she writes, “we have a playbook too”. She
advocates better civics lessons in schools,
prosecuting armed militias as terrorists,
reform of what is a terribly inefficient and
patchwork voting system, tech regulation
and much greater attention to developing
policies that benefit the majority of citi-
zens. The threat can be averted. To which
the watching Brit, otherwise powerless,
can only whisper a heartfelt: “Amen.”‘No one wants
to believe
that their
b elove d
democracy
is in decline,
or headed
toward war’
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