Understanding Civil Wars
To understand war is to understand civil war. The most common form of large-scale political violence, civil wars are a constant in human history, affecting countries from Sudan to Myanmar around the world today.
Professor Monica Duffy Toft seeks to understand and explain these conflicts. Her new book, Civil Wars: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press), provides a rigorous yet accessible overview of civil wars, probing their causes and consequences. She sat down with Fletcher for an interview on the book, its insights, and how Fletcher contributes to scholarship on war.
The Fletcher School: What examples of civil wars – whether historical or contemporary – do you examine in the book?
Monica Duffy Toft: The examples are broad and vast, because civil wars are not a new phenomenon. I start with ancient periods and forward to current events, tracing the phenomenon of civil wars over millennia. I examine conflicts from Mesopotamia to the English Civil War through to Chechnya in the 1990s and Sudan today.
The issues people fight over have been plaguing humanity since time immemorial: ideas around power, resources, and emotions.
What commonalities set civil wars aside from international conflicts?
Civil wars occur within a state’s borders, rather than between states. When civil wars end, unless one side is absolutely defeated or successfully secedes, the parties have to live together and coexist within the borders of their state.
Civil wars often occur between a state and nonstate actors who lack legitimacy. Inviting opposition groups or insurgents to negotiate means recognizing them as equal partners, partners who deserve a seat at the table. This can make it especially challenging to end a civil war through negotiation.
Are civil wars increasing in the world today, compared to the recent past?
Relative to interstate wars, or wars between states, civil wars have always been fairly common. But we had a period through the 1990s when a good number of civil wars were negotiated and settled. The liberal order, one could argue, was taking hold.
In reality, the Soviet Union and the United States had been buttressing civil wars around the globe, supporting sides as proxies in their competition with each other. When the Soviet Union collapsed, it could no longer support its proxies, so these civil wars were resolved. People called this a “peace dividend” caused by the end of the Cold War. This seems to have dissipated, and we are now in a period characterized by the reemergence of political violence within and across states. Just consider the ongoing civil war Syria, Sudan, South Sudan and interstate war in Ukraine.
During the Cold War, many conflicts were ideological: communists versus capitalists, business owners versus labor, land versus capital. More recently, we’ve seen a shift to religion. While governments promised grand ideas about saving the world from communism, religious actors waited in the wings, gathering legitimacy by delivering social services and schooling. Questions about the role of religion in a state spilled into the public arena. The change since the 1990s is not merely an increase in the quantity of civil wars, but also a difference in what people fight over.
Are we able to predict where and when a civil war might emerge?
I've been on some task forces where we try to do exactly that, through sophisticated statistical analysis and modeling. Academics cannot predict with certainty, but we can identify likelihoods, looking at structural factors: ethnic polarization, elite factionalization, poverty. Infant mortality, for example, helps indicate whether a government is capable of taking care of its population. These factors give us a sense as to which countries are more susceptible to slipping into civil war.
Triggers, meanwhile, are harder to predict. These are more proximate causes: demonstrations, protests, media publications. The Arab Spring began after the self-immolation of a young Tunisian street vendor, which was seen as an emblematic stand against government injustice. While we cannot predict these sorts of events, the book explains the underlying conditions that give them power to trigger a country into war.
With this in mind, are there situations in the world today that strike you as candidates for the outbreak of war?
One of the countries that makes me nervous is the United States. If you look at the indicators of the United States, they're there.
We’re a developed country with a longstanding constitution, but we also have a highly factionalized elite. We have ethnic and racial polarization. Infant mortality is increasing. We have high levels of income inequality.
Importantly, the United States had a prior civil war. In my classes at Fletcher, I tell students that if they learn nothing else, they should understand that the biggest indicator of a civil war is a prior civil war. In states with previous civil wars, there are long memories, stories and narratives told for generations, that become part of the fabric of society, keeping a sense of grievance or injustice alive.
In the insurrection of January 6th, we saw the comfort of some political actors with violence as a tool to help them to achieve what they're trying to achieve. When political actors abandon the social contract, employing rhetoric that describes the opposition as enemies of the state, you should start getting nervous. Rhetoric can lead to action. And unfortunately, sometimes that action leads to large scale political violence.
Still, the United States has a successful economy and strong capacity for national defense. Are there examples in history of countries that have been wealthy and powerful, but nevertheless slipped into the Civil War?
Yes. Yugoslavia was a highly-developed society, but elite outbidding pushed the political system to a point where extreme nationalists dominated. Syria was a developed country that became pummeled to rubble. The capital of Chechnya, Grozny, was an advanced city in the 1990s, and it was destroyed.
We do not want to underestimate the ability of human societies to decivilize. It seems crazy that a society would undermine its economic development, constitutional protections, safeguards of human rights, and basic civil liberties. It seems irrational but it happens time and time again.
The truth is that most individuals within a society are fence sitters. Elite leadership can guide, organize, and accumulate followers. At the point of survival, people are forced to choose sides.
Most citizens don't want civil war. Most people just want to live their lives, take their kids to school, come home, and have a family meal. But unfortunately, politics is a very serious business. When people are willing to play with politics, not negotiate to the point where violence seems to be the only solution, then the other side is compelled to take up violence as well.
What would largescale political violence look like in the United States?
Civil war in the United States would not look like the civil war of the 19th century, where the south and the north were organized into states.
Instead, I think about the pockets of armed militias. We’ve seen capitals and governors being threatened. It’s reminiscent of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. This is what happened on January 6th; there was alignment of different militias, talking to one another, organizing with one another. In a scenario of widescale violence, I imagine that they would try to challenge at the state level, trying to get hold of a state government or two, and spill out to the broader United States.
How did you become interested in the study of civil wars?
I have been studying civil wars now for about 30 years. I was first interested in nationalism, this very powerful idea about people willing to sacrifice themselves and not get anything for it. Unlike religious adherents who believe they will be rewarded in heaven, nationalists believe they are protecting the nation: the language, the homeland, the culture, the ethnic makeup, the cuisine, the terrain. It's for future generations and in honor of the past generations who brought the nation forward. It's an extraordinary idea, and it's a beautiful idea, except that sometimes it turns violent.
I wrote my master's thesis on Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He wrote two constitutions, one for Corsica and one for Poland, at a time when those nations were being run over by larger empires. This is a liberal thinker pleading with nations to maintain their national character. I was fascinated with what enlightenment ideas of liberty and sovereignty meant for individuals and nations.
For my PhD, I started reading and researching ethnic nationalism in the modern era, writing my dissertation on the conditions under which ethnic conflict turns violent. That expanded to look at civil wars writ large, beyond ethnically-inspired wars.
What opportunities will students at Fletcher have to learn more about this topic?
I teach a class on civil wars, and Professor Richard Shultz teaches a class on internal wars. We also have classes on terrorism, a common form of political violence often found within a civil war.
There's also research going on. The Leir Institute studies migration, which is closely associated with political violence and civil wars. At the Center of Strategic Studies, I lead research projects on global conflicts, supported by master's students and PhD students. Our Afghanistan Assumptions Project examines the misunderstandings that guided U.S. involvement for 20 years in the Afghan civil war.
International security has always been a strong, popular field of study at Fletcher. In the classroom and through our centers and programs, students have many ways to contribute to our understanding of civil wars.
Civil Wars: A Very Short Introduction is available from Oxford University Press.