How Civil Wars Start

And How to Stop Them

Hardcover, 304 pages

Published Jan. 4, 2022 by Crown.

ISBN:
9780593137789

View on OpenLibrary

5 stars (3 reviews)

The influence of modern life on the civil wars, with an emphasis on grievance, faction and democratic backsliding.

3 editions

Too Close for Comfort

5 stars

Democracy has been in decline around the world for the last several years, as the ascendance of the far-right, including Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Marine La Pen in France, the AfD in Germany, and Donald Trump in the United States, has made clear. The health of any democracy can be measured objectively using a polity score, which determines if a country is an autocracy (low polity score), a democracy (high polity score), or an anocracy—something between an autocracy and a democracy. Since Donald Trump was elected in 2016, the polity score for the United States has been in a state of steady decline. After the January 6, 2021 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol, the polity score dropped sufficiently for the U.S. to be recategorized as an anocracy. That means that the United States is no longer the longest-standing continuous democracy. That title now belongs to Switzerland, followed by New Zealand …

MUST READ: The U.S. Is In Danger

5 stars

Societies plunge into chaos when two preconditions are met. The first is anocracy - the transition zone between democracy and dictatorship. Doesn't matter which way they're moving, it's the change, like a hermit crab getting a new shell, that creates the hazard.

The second is factionalization. We've got well past political parties and into a world where changing is as momentous as converting to a new religion. We mix a little bit less each day and it feels like violence is never very far away.

America has multiple aggrieved ethnic and sectarian groups. The only way to climb down from this is to focus on democratic participation, as South Africa did in the 1990s. The GOP are dragging us precisely in the wrong direction, making violent conflict inevitable.