Book Review: How Civil Wars Start: and How to Stop Them by Dr. Barbara F. Walter
After listening to Dr. Walter’s appearance on the Braver Angels Podcast (full disclosure we have corresponded via email about the episode) promoting her new book entitled How Civil Wars Start, I was immediately intrigued by her concise understanding of radicalization processes [1]. As a fellow traveler in organized group violence, the subject matter and ethnographical story-telling abilities on display by Dr. Walter really draw the reader into the material and for that reason alone it would be worth the read. Talented storytelling has been a source for moral lessons and warnings since humans started writing, and it is effective in ways that dry academic texts can never match.
But of course, there is a lot more that this book has to educate and warn us about. I tend to find this subject area (and our reactions to it) a bit amusing as each new offering warning about the potential collapse of the state/civilization tends to be written off by some as “melodramatic”. I figure this will remain the case right up until the last offering served up by conflict scholars before the shooting starts. That one will probably go down in history as extremely prescient. How prescient is Dr. Walter’s book? I would not bet much against it. Fortunately, solutions are available to prevent this outcome if society chooses to follow them and Dr. Walter helpfully includes many ideas on lowering factionalism. But I do have a critique on how she describes the factions in play.
There is a saying I picked up in the military’s diving community, called the “mechanism of injury” that I think is illustrative of my minor critiques of Dr. Walter’s work. For example, while the treatment for a punctured lung is basically the same, a punctured lung from a bullet wound and a punctured lung from an over-pressurization diving injury (think of a lung popping like a balloon) are very different mechanisms of injury. I want to start this review with an observation that I would like the reader to consider. What does cause societies’ “haves and have nots” to begin down the path toward Civil War? Is there research that predates that described in Dr. Walter’s book? I believe there is.
Dr. Walters’s focus on race, ethnicity, anocracy, and factionalism are not wrong per se in my opinion insomuch they might lack descriptive clarity. While race is an immutable and highly visible characteristic, it is not a determinative one by itself as anyone who compares Senator Tim Scott’s and Senator Cory Booker’s respective disparate ideological in-groups. To my mind, a better set of terms would be: in-group, tribe, perceived victimization, out-group threats, and what Professor Chalmers Johnson called a dissyncronized society 12 years before the CIA came up with the term anocracy in 1994 [1].
Chalmers Johnson of Stanford University stated in 1982’s Revolutionary Change “[o]n the basis of this hypothesis we should expect to find the black slaves in America of Hindu outcasts in India were historically the most rebellious social groups. Actually, we know that both these groups were among the least rebellious so long as their values and their environment synchronized with each other. Neither can the American Civil War or the Satsuma Rebellion in Japan (1877) be understood simply as a war of the poor against the rich. Barnett’s conclusion on the effects of depriving people of “essential” material products is inescapable: “Deprivation” refers to the elimination of something that a person believes he (or she) has a right to expect. “Essentials” is an entirely relative term. It takes on meaning only in the light of the system of values of a specific [in-group] (ethnic group in original)” [Emphasis Added] [2].
Students of the various flavors of the Social Identity Theory espoused by academics like Henri Tajfel have found visibility is a major component of in-group identification, but it is not the only variable that provides the structures required for social identity (in fact it is one of six) [3]. Additionally, Tajfel’s research found it was remarkably easy to get in-group members to discriminate against out-group members even when they knew the groups themselves were randomly selected. What does appear universally true is that in-groups who feel victimized, threatened, or have their goals frustrated by out-groups tend to become disssyncronized, become stronger, more homogeneous internally, and more violent against their perceived out-groups [4].
If we want to prevent a Civil War in the United States, we need to better understand how and why various in-groups form. It is not as simple as Samuel Huntington thought in the 1998 in the Clash of Civilizations, nor Barbara Walter’s 2022 How Civil Wars Start [5]. Nor are the causal variables any particular “universal” triggering action by the party in power. Instead, widespread in-group victimization is based on what is “essential” to the in-group itself as Johnson determined decades ago. However, once these in-groups exist and begin this radicalization process, Civil War becomes more likely. Dr. Walter’s description of the processes that could lead to Civil War in the US are absolutely correct, and we would be wise to heed them, even if there are some minor areas that I think could be clarified.
1. Walter, B.F., How civil wars start: And how to stop them. 2022: Crown.
2. Johnson, C., Revolutionary change. 2nd ed. 1982, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. vii, 217 p.
3. Tajfel, H., Social identity and intergroup relations. Vol. 7. 2010: Cambridge University Press.
4. Doosje, B., R. Spears, and N. Ellemers, Social identity as both cause and effect: the development of group identification in response to anticipated and actual changes in the intergroup status hierarchy. British Journal of Social Psychology, 2002. 41(1): p. 57-76.
5. Huntington, S.P., The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order. Simon & Schuster hardcover ed. 2011, New York: Simon & Schuster. 367 p.