Is the US Headed Towards Another Civil War? | Barbara F. Walter | TED

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.

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,

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 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.

And 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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, 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.

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.

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.

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.

But there's perhaps an easier solution, at least in the short term.

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."

"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.

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.

(Applause)