Is The US Headed Towards Another Civil War? - Barbara F. Walter (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Barbara F. Walter’s talk titled “Is The US Headed Towards Another Civil War?” at TED conference.

In this talk, Barbara F. Walter, an expert on civil wars, discusses the increasing possibility of a civil war in the United States, drawing on her extensive research and experiences. She explains that since 1946, civil wars have been on the rise globally, and her work with the CIA’s Political Instability Task Force has identified key predictors of civil wars.

Walter highlights that partial democracies, or anocracies, and political identity divisions are major risk factors for civil conflict. She points out the alarming trend of the U.S. exhibiting these factors, with its democracy being downgraded in recent years. Walter emphasizes that civil wars are often started by groups who once held power but are now in decline, relating this to current trends in the U.S.

She proposes solutions such as addressing anocracy, managing identity politics, and regulating social media to mitigate these risks. Walter’s talk serves as a warning and a call to action to prevent a potential civil war in the U.S. through proactive measures and democratic strengthening.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

I’m going to talk about a threat that most people don’t want to think about. It’s too frightening and it doesn’t seem real. That threat is civil war. Since 1946, over 250 civil wars have broken out and that number continues to increase. There are now almost 50 percent more civil wars than there were in 2001.

Understanding Civil Wars

I’ve been studying civil wars for over 30 years. I’ve interviewed members of Hamas in the West Bank, ex-Sinn Féin members in Northern Ireland, and former members of the FARC in Colombia. I’ve stood on top of the Golan Heights and stared into Syria at the top of the Syrian civil war. I’ve driven across Zimbabwe as the military was planning its coup against Robert Mugabe. I’ve been followed and interrogated by members of Myanmar’s junta.

In 2017, I was asked to serve on a task force run by the CIA called the Political Instability Task Force. One of the goals of that task force was to come up with a model to help the US government predict what countries around the world were likely to experience ethnic conflict and civil war. It turns out that predicting civil war is possible. Solid data exists on where and when these conflicts are likely to break out. It’s just that most people don’t know that.

The Task Force

The task force was comprised of two types of people: experts on civil war like myself and data analysts. The experts came up with 38 different factors that they thought could potentially lead a country towards civil war. Some of those factors seemed obvious, like whether a country was poor, had lots of income inequality, or had a government that heavily discriminated against one particular group. It turns out that only two factors were highly predictive, and they weren’t the ones the experts expected.

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The first was whether a country was an anocracy. Anocracy is just a fancy term for partial democracy. It’s a government that’s neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic. It’s something in between. So think about Hungary today. Hungary holds elections. Hungarians eagerly go out and vote. It’s just that whoever wins those elections can basically do whatever they want.

The second factor was whether citizens in these anocracies had formed political parties around identity rather than ideology. So rather than joining a party because you were liberal or conservative, capitalist or communist, you joined a party because you were Black or white, Christian or Muslim, Serb or Croat. If a country had these two features, the task force considered it at high risk of political violence and put it on a watchlist. It was actually called The Watchlist and it was sent to the White House.

The United States’ Situation

So here I was, sitting in a hotel conference room in suburban Virginia four times a year with a room full of really smart people. And we talked about countries in Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, but we never, ever talked about the United States. That’s because the CIA is legally not allowed to monitor the United States or its citizens. And that’s exactly the way it should be.

But I was a private citizen and I had this information and I could see that both of these factors were emerging in my own country and they were emerging at a surprisingly fast rate. The US’s democracy has been downgraded three times since 2016. In 2016, it was downgraded because international election monitors had considered the 2016 election free, but not entirely fair. America’s own intelligence agencies had found that the Russians had, in fact, meddled in that election.

It was downgraded again in 2019 when the White House refused to comply with requests by Congress for information. And it was downgraded a final time at the end of 2020 when President Trump refused to accept his loss in the 2020 election, and actively attempted to overturn the results.

Between December of 2020 and early 2021, the United States was officially classified as an anocracy. If the task force had been allowed to monitor and study the United States, it likely would have considered it at high risk of political instability and political violence in December of 2020, just a few weeks before the January 6 insurrection. And it likely would have put the United States on the watchlist.

Who Starts Civil Wars?

We also know who tends to start civil wars. And again, it’s not the people most of us think. It is not the poorest people in society. It is not the people who are most oppressed by their government. The people who tend to start civil wars, especially ethnically-based civil wars, are the groups that had once been politically dominant but are in decline.

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If you think back to the former Yugoslavia, Serbs had enjoyed most of the positions in government and the military throughout the Cold War for decades. But they were the ones who stood to lose the most as Yugoslavia democratized. The Serbs started that war.

Iraq’s Sunnis similarly enjoyed most of the key positions in the military and in government under Saddam Hussein. But when the United States toppled Saddam Hussein, they also threw the Sunnis out of their positions. It was the Sunnis who started that war. In the United States, the rise of militias has been driven primarily by white men who see America’s identity changing in ways that directly threatens their status. They were the ones who marched on the capital on January 6.

Demographic Changes and the Future

So why is this happening now? It’s happening now because of demographic change. The United States is in the midst of a major transition from a country whose population is majority white to a country whose population will be majority non-white. The United States will be the first country to go through this, but others are going to follow. Canada is likely to be next, followed by New Zealand and then the UK, and eventually all the English-speaking countries of the world.

This is likely to be especially true if climate change causes citizens from the global South to increasingly move north. These countries are going to be looking to the United States to see how we manage this demographic shift. Americans can allow this transition to tear us apart. Or we could use it to come together to show the world how to manage this change and in the process create a truly multiethnic, multi-religious democracy.

So how do you do this? The first thing we have to do is address the two big risk factors of civil war: anocracy and identity politics.

Addressing the Risk Factors

To address anocracy, we have to improve the rule of law. We have to ensure equal access to every citizen to the vote. We have to reduce corruption and we have to improve the quality of government services. But reforming a government takes time. Those are not easy things to do and it often seems impossible. That’s exactly where the United States is today, almost paralyzed. This is where business can come in.

Thirty years ago, most of us thought that South Africa was barreling towards civil war. Black South Africans were increasingly protesting the brutality of the white apartheid regime, and the government responded with more brutality. But then something happened.

The business community stepped in and demanded real democracy. They did this because they had been suffering under years of crushing economic sanctions and eventually they had to choose between apartheid and profits, and they chose profits. And when they went to the government and said, “We will no longer support you,” the apartheid regime knew it could not survive and reform happened quickly.

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The business community can also help address identity politics by investing in those communities that have been left behind by globalization and by free-trade agreements like NAFTA. In the United States, it was the working class that disproportionately suffered. Those are the communities that are the most angry and the most resentful today. Businesses can invest in better health care, better education, and a higher minimum wage so that they create a group of people who are hopeful about the future and less vulnerable to the calls by extremists to burn the system down.

Regulating Social Media and Ensuring Peace

But there’s perhaps an easier solution, at least in the short term. And that is to regulate social media, especially the algorithms that push out the most incendiary and divisive material. I’m not saying that we should censor free speech. Let people put whatever they want on social media, but do not allow the algorithms to amplify the messages by bullies and hatemongers and conspiracy theorists and enemies of democracy. If we take away their bullhorn, their influence will decline.

I’ve interviewed a lot of people who have lived through a civil war and they all say the same thing: “I didn’t see it coming.” Berina Kovac was a young mother living in Sarajevo at the beginning of the Bosnian civil war. She told me that in the months and weeks leading up to that war, life seemed normal. She went to work. She took weekend holidays with her husband. They went to the weddings of their friends. But then one night in March of 1992, when she was at home with her newborn son, the lights suddenly went out. And then she said, you started to hear machine guns.

Conclusion

It doesn’t have to be this way. We know an enormous amount about why these terrible wars start. We know that the people intent on violence have a playbook. We know what that playbook is. But there’s no reason why we, the democracy-loving people of this world, can’t create our own playbook to prevent civil war. But to do that, we have to be brave enough to fight for real democracy, strong democracy, because only by fighting for democracy can we ensure that we will truly get peace.

Thank you.

Is The US Headed Towards Another Civil War? – Barbara F. Walter (Transcript)