My father was a U.S. diplomat with the nice fortune to be posted to Paraguay, the identical country by which he and my mother had served within the Peace Corps within the Seventies. The dictator Alfredo Stroessner had been deposed in 1989, and we were there within the early years of the country’s recent democracy. I used to be in eighth grade in 1996, when General Lino Oviedo, fired from his position as army chief by Juan Carlos Wasmosy, the country’s first civilian president since before the dictatorship, began to barnstorm the country, threatening a military coup.
The coup was thwarted. Because at 14 one cares little or no for his father’s role in such episodes, I needed to look up the history later to recall precisely how. Nevertheless, I can recall to today the stories of Oviedo’s rambling hourslong speeches to the populace, told in a mix of Spanish, German and the native Guaraní.
A civil war within the twenty first century doesn’t seem like the civil wars of even the latter half of the twentieth.
In her book How Civil Wars Start: And The right way to Stop Them, Barbara F. Walter, the Rohr Chair in Pacific International Relations on the University of California San Diego, offers a handy guide for interpreting this episode. Walter is an authority in civil wars, and a member of the Polity Project on the Center for Systemic Peace, a group of students and researchers who “had taken civil war data from all over the world and built a model that might predict where instability was more than likely to occur.”
Years of research and evaluation tell us that “probably the greatest predictors of whether a rustic will experience a civil war is whether or not it’s moving toward or away from democracy. Yes, democracy.” Researchers spend considerable energy cataloging and categorizing countries’ systems of presidency, rating them on a 21-point scale from -10 (autocracy) to +10 (democracy). For a full autocracy, think Saudi Arabia or North Korea. For a stable democracy, think Denmark, Canada and america…whoops. More on that below.
The center zone, between -5 and +5, is what experts call “anocracies.” It’s a political science term of art, clunky at first, but one which made increasing sense because the book made its case. Anocracy describes governments moving toward either end of the spectrum—though after all, many occupy that middle zone for years and even a long time without moving in a single direction or the opposite. Importantly, it’s the movement as such that serves as the very best predictor of civil conflict, not the rating or the direction. Countries becoming roughly democratic are at greater risk of civil war, and so anocracy could be seen because the needed but not sufficient criterion for political violence.
The primary half of the book lays out the political science, with each of the key predictors of civil war getting its own chapter, constructing sequentially on the foundations of the last. The chapters are driven by an explication of the familiar civil conflicts emblematic of those risk aspects, even of their specificity.
In keeping with Walter, america is “not the world’s oldest continuous democracy.”
Within the chapter “The Rise of Factions,” Walter describes how aspiring autocrats cultivated racial and ethnic resentments that culminated in brutal ethnic violence in the previous Yugoslavia and in Rwanda. In “The Dark Consequence of Losing Status,” she describes how a sudden change in the ability of a particular ethnic group could be more inflammatory than a sustained structural imbalance. For instance, in Syria, Sunni Muslims realized that they were being boxed out of power by Shiite Muslims, while the inverse occurred in neighboring Iraq. Ditto the Muslim population of Mindanao within the Philippines and the Abkhazians in Georgia.
In “When Hope Dies,” Walter explains how, despite literally centuries of British occupation, the Provisional Irish Republican Army only got here to be within the twentieth century, when the Catholics finally lost hope that the British military would protect them against Protestant violence.
My only quibble in reading this was with the usage of political science jargon. Terms like “ethnic entrepreneurs” prove to mean almost the other of the plain language—not upstart small business-owning immigrants, but racist demagogues.
The second section of the book addresses the query any likely reader would presumably be asking: Is it going to occur here?
While this section of the book is unlikely to maneuver the politically calcified, it’s not possible to read in the sunshine of the still-unfolding January 6 Committee hearings in Congress and never be terrified.
But america is a democracy, you’ll protest. Sadly, no. Our rating on the autocracy-democracy scale slid considerably through the Trump years, as that administration, its enablers in Congress and sympathetic statehouses sought systematically to dismantle democratic institutions. Within the wake of Trump’s attempts to overturn the outcomes of the 2020 election, america slid right down to a +5.
In Walter’s words: “America became an anocracy for the primary time in greater than 2 hundred years. Let that sink in. We aren’t any longer the world’s oldest continuous democracy.” We entered anocracy at a time when the political parties have coalesced less along ideological or policy agendas than along racial, ethnic and non secular lines.
As Walter makes clear, this isn’t a both-sides problem. This can be a problem with the Republican Party, which enabled a racist demagogue to pursue an ethnic-nationalist agenda—the Muslim ban, the detainment of kids across the U.S.-Mexico border—and is now, in plain sight, engaging in a second round of systematic, multi-level, extralegal attempts to subvert future elections to secure the rule of its largely white Christian party. If this paragraph makes you uncomfortable, I suggest poring over Walter’s 46-page bibliography. All of the information, all the research and all of the present reporting back up these claims.
There’s one remaining aspect to the argument. A civil war within the twenty first century doesn’t seem like the civil wars of even the latter half of the twentieth. It’s best described as a state of sustained racialized insurgent violence, not unlike the diffuse acts of terrorist cells equivalent to Hamas.
How does a rustic prevent a civil war? “Bolster the rule of law, give all residents equal access to the vote, and improve the standard of presidency services.”
Recall that in 2020, antigovernment white nationalists sought to kidnap and execute the Democratic governor of Michigan. Later, Kyle Rittenhouse, a minor, traveled across state lines after which used an AR-15 rifle, a weapon of war, to murder two unarmed protesters. Earlier this summer, parade-goers celebrating the Fourth of July in Chicago were mowed down by a person who was also armed with an AR-15 rifle.
And lest we forget, on Jan. 6, 2021, a mob of Trump supporters—led, we now know, in premeditated paramilitary formation by white supremacist militias just like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers—stormed the Capitol, assaulted cops and sought to hold the vice chairman. To today, almost each elected Republican at any level of office within the country has made the minimization and denial of this meticulously documented event the cornerstone of their political agenda.
Perhaps when Walter describes a three-part escalation of insurgency, and puts america at approaching the center stage, the reader finds the sense of urgency not proportionate enough to what’s already happening.
As for the way to prevent a civil war, that part seems to be remarkably easy: “Bolster the rule of law, give all residents equal access to the vote, and improve the standard of presidency services.” Easy, that’s, if you happen to ignore the incontrovertible fact that D.C. is dysfunctional, corrupt and structurally unrepresentative of the populace.
General Lino Oviedo, to his limited credit, was instrumental within the military coup that overthrew the truly despicable Stroessner. My friends—8 years old in 1989—remember the night well: grandparents attempting to keep them quiet as they huddled behind couches, tanks rumbling through the streets, a neighbor shot in his yard because he refused to obey curfew.
After public protests derailed Wasmosy’s appeasement offer of one other cabinet position, Oviedo ran for president. He had the fitting idea—in spite of everything, probably the greatest predictors of violent civil conflict is whether or not the country has already had one. Why not reinvent himself and exploit old grievances and a weak government? That’s the playbook.
Oviedo was leading within the polls when he was charged with plotting the coup and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Imagine that.
