📚 How Civil Wars Start

Finished reading How Civil Wars Start by Barbara F. Walter. I picked this up from Heather Burns’ 2023 ‘get ready for the coming US election’ reading list. The title is perfect, as the book is literally a narrative that explains the research into the conditions that can typically lead to civil war. It’s been interesting to read this in such close proximity to the riots in the UK that have been taking place over the past week.

A central point of the book is that countries that are neither full democracies nor full autocracies as defined by the ‘polity score’ — known as ‘anocracies’ — are the most likely to experience instability and/or armed conflict. There is danger as a country moves through the anocracy zone, whether that is a country that has declined from being a full democracy, or a country that is moving at speed towards full democracy.

The USA slipped from a rating of 10 in 2015 to a rating of 5 in 2020, following the insurrection on 6 January that year. It became an anocracy for the first time in over two centuries.

Once a country is in the anocracy zone, the biggest warning sign of a civil war is the appearance of a faction, a political group based on ethnic, religious or racial identity rather than ideology. Civil war is even more likely in countries divided into two dominant groups, where one group represents 40–60% of the population. The group that once held power and feels it slipping away is likely to be the one that starts the violence.

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.

In recent years, social media has accelerated this process. The proportion of Americans getting some of their news from social media has increased from 23% in 2013 to over 70% today. The platforms promote “a sense of perpetual crisis”. The riots in the UK over this past week are fresh in my mind as I re-read this:

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.

I’m not sure that this is exactly what is happening right now in the UK — so far the riots don’t seem to have spread to moderate people — but I can see how it might happen.

Walter weaves the ten stages of genocide into her narrative. According to Wikipedia, stage 4 is ‘dehumanisation’, where “One group denies the humanity of the other group. Members of it are equated with animals, vermin, insects, or diseases.” The ongoing narrative about refugees and asylum seekers in the UK’s most popular newspapers promotes this way of thinking, and has been so painful to see.

“THE ‘SWARM’ ON OUR STREETS” is a disgusting headline. The Daily Mail has been pushing this agenda for as long as I can remember. It may be impossible to draw a direct line between these front pages and the riots that have been happening in the UK over the past week, but they can’t help.

The author also mentions Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), an organisation that publishes fascinating reports and datasets on how countries around the world are democratising or autocratizing. The recent reports are jarring.

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.

The book explains that the most effective way for a country to avoid violence and civil war is to strengthen the quality of its governance, and make people feel that the systems and institutions are working. People need to value their democracy and believe that it is effective. Doing this is “significantly more important” to avoid conflict than improving the economy.

“…three features stood out: “the rule of law” (the equal and impartial application of legal procedure); “voice and accountability” (the extent to which citizens are able to participate in selecting their government, as well as freedom of expression, freedom of association, and a free media); and “government effectiveness” (the quality of public services and the quality and independence of the civil service). These three features reflect the degree to which a government serves its people and the degree to which its political institutions are strong, legitimate, and accountable. Improvements in governance tend to reduce the subsequent risk of war.”

The book is a quick read on a tough subject, giving an excellent overview of the resources and evidence available.