Walter treats South Africa as a paradigm of the way civil wars should be headed off. In her telling, civil war in South Africa was prevented by the country’s ‘most important trading partners’, the US, Europe and Japan, which imposed sanctions in 1986 ‘in response to the escalating oppression by the apartheid government’, and by the far-sighted pragmatism of the country’s last white leader, F.W. de Klerk, who ended minority rule after he became president three years later. Mandela’s main role, in this version, was emollience: ‘Mandela ... could have advocated ethnic violence – he could have been an ethnic entrepreneur, tapping the anger and resentment of his Black countrymen to seek full control of South Africa through civil war. But instead he preached healing, unity and peace.’ She doesn’t play down the horrors inflicted by white minority rule on Blacks, from the killing of 176 children in Soweto in 1976 to the ‘indiscriminate arrests, police killings and torture’ under the state of emergency in the mid-1980s. But her rapid sketch of the end of apartheid gives the impression that the Black majority and its white sympathisers were passive in the face of oppression, and that there was nothing resembling a civil war in South Africa. In fact, as well as bombings, there were strikes (more than a thousand in 1987 alone), civil disobedience, boycotts of fake elections, sabotage, attacks on people seen as collaborators. In their History of South Africa Leonard Thompson and Lynn Berat write that between 1986 and 1988 ‘more than a hundred explosions caused 31 deaths and 56 injuries in streets, restaurants, cinemas, shopping centres and sports complexes in the major cities.’ The army said the country was at war and deployed thousands of troops to the townships. The struggle extended far beyond South Africa: in its effort to crush sources of anti-apartheid activity the government attacked neighbouring countries, invaded Angola, occupied Namibia and destabilised Mozambique, leading, according to a Commonwealth committee, to the deaths of a million people. Walter’s brisk reference to South Africa’s ‘most important trading partners’ glosses over the difficulties and risks anti-apartheid activists faced in forcing European and American leaders to impose sanctions when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher sympathised with the Pretoria regime.
Walter’s attribution of the fall of apartheid to pity, white-collar public outrage, elite wisdom, capitalist pragmatism and demographic determinism is odd in a book about civil war. Her text struggles to contain the tension between the view that civil war is an absolute evil, and the possibility that in some civil wars one side is right and the other is wrong. It is as if cherished liberal causes – democracy, equal rights, tolerance – should not be associated with the grubbiness of inter-communal violence; as if the fact that the partial victory of these causes in certain countries had to be fought for, in the literal sense of the word, is a dangerous secret.
Walter, a professor of international relations at UC San Diego, offers a quantitative approach to the study of civil wars, identifying common factors and packing them into databases to create a kind of world conflict alert dashboard. She presents this as a scientific consensus, as if civil wars were viruses or hurricanes. Like a medical professional writing for a public health website, she lets you know that the detail of the underlying science has been settled but is too fiddly to share with a general audience. Phrases like ‘researchers found’ and ‘what experts call’ are sprinkled throughout. Not that she discourages the keen from digging more deeply. ‘Today, anyone can access dozens of high-quality datasets (the results are triple checked) related to how civil wars start, how long they last, how many people die, and why they fight ... Civil wars ignite and escalate in ways that are predictable; they follow a script.’
The number-crunching core of her case is the work done by a Virginia-based non-profit called the Centre for Systemic Peace, which gives countries a ‘polity score’ on a 21-point scale ranging from minus 10 to plus 10. Any country that scores plus 6 or more is deemed democratic, minus 6 or less, autocratic. Countries in between are categorised as ‘anocracies’. After the storming of the Capitol in 2021, America’s polity score slumped from 7 to 5, making it a non-democracy. Walter treats this as a fact. ‘The United States,’ she writes,
is an anocracy for the first time in more than two hundred years. Let that sink in. We are no longer the world’s oldest continuous democracy. That honour is now held by Switzerland ... We are no longer a peer to nations like Canada, Costa Rica and Japan.
Systemic Peace hasn’t publicly updated its ratings for most countries since 2018, but for reference, the eight countries rated 5 that year were Ecuador, Haiti, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Papua New Guinea, Somalia and Suriname. The ways Systemic Peace’s data diverge from what a lay person would expect of a democracy-autocracy scale are interesting. The US is rated as a sound democracy from 1829 until just before the Civil War, despite its embrace of slavery in that period. Belgium scores a solid 6 for much of its brutal rule over Congo. The UK gets a perfect 10 rating from 1922, despite being, at that time, at the head of a racially organised, exploitative empire that denied democratic rights to millions. Walter claims that a polity score is the best predictor of a country’s instability, but Systemic Peace gives Britain a 10 throughout the period of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which Walter uses elsewhere as an example of an actual civil war.
Walter’s insistence that predicting civil wars is a hard-edged science that can be used as a warning system, a geopolitical smoke alarm, distracts from the value of her global approach, which challenges any country’s claim to be uniquely democratic by nature, or to have reached a level of democracy from which there can be no falling back. She offers a set of concepts for analysing civil strife that are useful in themselves and as markers of the universality of societal change. Anocracy is the most unstable polity; unlike democracy or autocracy, it tends not to last. The journey from autocracy to democracy, when freedom of expression and action burst out ahead of reasonable restraints like honest judges, fair taxation and non-governmental interest groups, is a dangerous time. ‘A painful reality of democratisation,’ Walter writes, ‘is that the faster and bolder the reform efforts, the greater the chance of civil war.’ Change can also go the other way. After half a century when it appeared democracy was spreading, more and bigger countries are using the mechanisms of democracy to choose leaders who love elections only when they win them, and reject them if they seem about to lose.
As she puts together her case that America is in peril, Walter uses the former Yugoslavia and Sri Lanka to illustrate the dangers of factionalism and its even more dangerous cousin the superfaction, created by a strong leader who rallies supporters around identity, shared history, language and symbols, rather than policies. She characterises Yugoslavia as a country with two superfactions, Serbs and Croats, divided by alphabet, place of habitation, religion and standard of living. She uses Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Sudan to exemplify the rise of the ethnic entrepreneur, who persuades people they’re menaced by ‘an out-group, and must band together under the entrepreneur to counter the threat’. In India, Modi uses this technique to harness the support of Hindus; in Brazil, Bolsonaro exploits the disgruntlement and unease of a white population which may recently have become a minority not simply because of demographics but because fewer people self-identify as white. The Serbs of Yugoslavia, the Sunnis of Iraq, the Muslim Moro of Mindanao and the Assamese of India are used as examples of ‘sons of the soil’ groups who feel they deserve better treatment than incomers and outsiders, and are psychic casualties of the perilous mood Walter calls ‘downgrading’:
People may tolerate years of poverty, unemployment and discrimination. They may accept shoddy schools, poor hospitals and neglected infrastructure. But there is one thing they will not tolerate: losing status in a place they believe is theirs. In the 21stcentury, the most dangerous factions are once-dominant groups facing decline.
There are too many ethnic entrepreneurs around the world to list: Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson in the UK; Vladimir Putin, the Russian Milošević; Pauline Hanson in Australia; Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour in France. But Walter holds course to her principal target, the ethnic entrepreneurs of anocratic America: Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Alex Jones, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton and ‘the biggest ethnic entrepreneur of all’ – Donald Trump (you imagine he would relish the superlative). Like his counterparts around the world, Trump built a superfaction from sons of the soil who feel downgraded. He ‘put the grievances of white, male, Christian, rural Americans into a simplified framework that painted them as victims whose rightful legacy had been stolen ... where is the United States today? We are a factionalised anocracy that is quickly approaching the open insurgency stage.’
www.nytimes.com
I got 5/10 on Biden. 
