Is America at Risk of a Civil War?

In a 21st-century civil war, guerrilla or terrorist attacks are directed at civilians. Jan. 6 response was key to whether the United States would move closer or further from civil war, Barbara F. Walter says.
by Hope Kahn, National Press Foundation

“After Mar-a-Lago Search, Talk of ‘Civil War’ Is Flaring Online,” a New York Times headline stated last week amid other news outlets’ columns and articles on the subject. But could that talk become a reality? Barbara Walter, international affairs professor at the University of California, San Diego, took on that question in her book “How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them.” Two days before the New York Times piece, she told Paul Miller fellows what factors to watch.

Look at failing democracies and factionalism. Walter was invited to join the Political Instability Task Force, a group of experts and analysts that determine a state’s risk of civil war. Out of 38 factors that contribute to a country’s risk, data analysts identified two that are most important, Walter said. Anocracy, or partial democracy, was one. If the democracy is weak, failing or new vs. a full democracy or full autocracy, a country is more likely to face civil war, she said. The second factor was whether the citizens of these partial democracies had organized themselves politically around identity, “so rather than having political parties that were based on particular ideas, so conservative principles versus liberal principles, they had political parties that were formed pretty much exclusively around race, ethnicity, or religion,” Walter said. A country with these two factors of anocracy and factionalism are at a 4% chance of civil war each year, she said. “That seems low, but it’s actually not low. It means that every year that those features continue to exist in a particular country, it goes up by 4%.” Though the task force did not study the United States, she observed these two factors emerging in the U.S. in 2016 at “a surprisingly rapid rate.”

What “stage” is the U.S. in now? The CIA has a manual on insurgency that lays out the three different phases of insurgency: the pre-insurgency phase, the incipient insurgency phase and the active insurgency phase. This manual is not in regard to the United States, but Walter has looked to it for warning signs. The incipient phase is when a group that has grievances against the government has started to articulate those grievances. The incipient violent phase is when there are isolated attacks. And the open insurgency phase begins when there is a series of consistent attacks against the government and other targets. When Jan. 6 occurred, author David Kilcullen said that the attack could have been the start of the open insurgency phase. “And now we know 10 months later, that was not the case,” Walter said. “What was really critical to whether we were going to go closer to stage three or move back towards stage one was how the U.S. government reacted to January 6th. So would the FBI be willing and able to go after the individuals who participated in January 6th? … The head of the Oath Keepers is likely going to go to prison … so I would say we’re towards stage one. We’re probably going to stay in the incipient insurgency phase. We’re not moving closer to civil war at this point.”

Pay attention to law enforcement. Evidence shows that some members of law enforcement have been sympathetic to far-right groups, raising questions about “how local law enforcement would respond” if violence broke out, Walter said. “We actually know who tends to start civil wars, and it’s not the weakest groups, it’s … the groups that had once been politically and socially dominant and are in decline,” Walter said. In the U.S., that’s white Christian men. Their dominance shifting has “left them angry and resentful and feeling threatened, and do have the capacity to organize oftentimes with law enforcement and the law turning a blind eye to them.”

Regulate social media, Walter said. When people ask the easiest way to tamp down the hatred, her answer is always to regulate social media. She said the research shows that there’s a connection between online extremist propaganda and the radicalization of individuals online. However, figuring out how this works is difficult. “What we really should be doing is regulating recommendation engines that are pushing the most violent and extreme material into people’s hands and in that way serving to radicalize them.” But as Big Tech companies like Facebook refuse to release their data, Walter said scholars can’t do the analysis that could find out exactly how this is happening.

Speaker: Barbara F. Walter, Author & Rohr Professor of International Affairs, School of Global Policy & Strategy, University of California, San Diego

Takeaways, transcript and resources: https://nationalpress.org/topic/barba...

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