Is the US headed toward a second civil war? This is from 2 years ago but I just saw it today. Barbara F. Walter from UC San Diego led a research project for the CIA where they analyzed 30 factors that correlated with civil war in countries other than the US. They found that there were 2 factors that predicted civil war: when the government is neither a democracy nor an autocracy, but in an in-between state (which she calls "anocracy"), and when people organize around identity rather than ideology.
As an example, she cites the civil war in Yugoslavia. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia tried to transition to democracy but never made it out of the in-between state. And in the elections, you might imagine they could have had parties organized around ideology, such as a communist party and a capitalist party, but instead what Yugoslavia got was a Serbian party and a Croat party.
So is the US headed toward a second civil war? Voting in the US is increasingly based on identity (which she defines as race, ethnicity, or religion), so the question largely rests on the question of how stable US democracy is or whether it is leading towards the in-between "anocracy" state. Which yo-yos up and down according to some index she cites where the strength of US democracy is estimated ("the polity scale"). In the end she seems to give an estimate of 4% odds per year. That means over a 20 year period, the odds reach 50%. I don't know about you, but 50/50 odds of a civil war in the next 20 years seems about right to me. [Insert sarcastic joke about 2024 election here.]
She doesn't mention that Yugoslavia didn't just have 2 ethnicities -- the country broke up into 7 countries as a result of the war. Thankfully the different ethnic groups have been able to live peacefully side-by-side in their own separate countries since the war. She also makes a point of putting the blame on Slobodan Milošević, the former ruler under the Soviet regime, and says that the group that formerly has power but sees their power decline are always the ones who start civil wars, not the downtrodden like people think. She doesn't mention that the US, NATO, and Russia got involved. I'm guessing I should interpret that as meaning that these details are not predictive factors of civil war in general.
If you're interested in more, she's published a whole book on the topic.
Kenneth N. Waltz Lecture in international relations: Is the US headed toward a second civil war?
#domesticpolitics #polysci #civilwar
