text: InFocus: How Civil Wars Start: ConclusionsI finished Barbara F. Walter’s How Civil Wars Start over the weekend. She’s a political partisan who doesn’t hide her contempt for conservatives. In that way, the book is disappointing but not surprising. That said, she does offer some valuable insight into how countries break down into civil war.The first half of the book was great. She describes in detail the foreign civil wars she’s studied, and draws some parallels to what’s going on today. The second half of the book unfortunately takes a turn for the worse. She spends much of it describing the ills of social media (warranted) and ways in which the political Right will instigate violence this decade. She outlines how conservative whites are losing status, a major driver of conflict I’ll get to later, and the plight of jobless conservatives and veterans. She describes the growth of minority demographics, who are on track to become politically dominant, and the relative loss of political power that conservative whites will experience over the coming decades. At the same time, she dismisses very real concerns such as mass illegal immigration as xenophobic paranoia, and suggests that rewriting election laws to expand voting opportunities is the gateway to more ‘inclusive democracy’ and, therefore, a peaceful future.I found much of the latter half of the book contrived, especially when she describes a coordinated right-wing terrorist bombing campaign that rips across numerous cities in the United States, igniting a civil war in the not-too-distant future. She also wholly discounts Floyd’s Rebellion in 2020 as a simple protest movement, instead of what it was: an attempted popular revolution like we saw during the Arab Spring in 2011 and Ukraine’s Euromaidan in 2014. For someone who studies civil wars, it’s difficult for me to believe that she doesn’t see this. Then again, Walter is exactly the type of academic elite who would support such a revolution against the Trump administration.What follows are my notes from the book describing parallels between foreign civil wars and what could happen in the United States.COLLAPSE: From the end of World War II, communist dictator Josip Tito kept Yugoslavia’s multi-ethnic and multi-cultural populations together with an iron fist. His death in 1980 created a power vacuum, which led to the formation of militias divided among ethnic and religious lines. Yugoslavia was not too dissimilar to the United States today in that more traditional Serbians lived predominantly in rural areas while the country’s cities were largely multi-ethnic and multi-cultural, consisting of a mix of Orthodox Christian Serbs, Roman Catholic Croats, and Muslim Bosniaks. According to Walter, these populations lived rather peacefully under Tito. Through the stoking of political and ethnic tension, according to Walter, Serbs and Croats by the early 1990s were both coached into believing that the other side was fomenting genocide, which led both sides to arm up against each other. Bosnians were forced to choose between being Bosnian Serb or Bosnian Croat. Serbs were looked down upon by the urban, multicultural class and seen as peasants, “despite being politically and militarily more powerful.” In response to the agitation from “ethnic entrepreneurs” who pushed for conflict in order to achieve political power, Serbian militias started expelling non-Serbs from rural land, and soon became more violent, engaging in a campaign of mass rape and murder of Croats. Radovan Stojicic, Serbian security chief under Milosevic, predicted, “One of these constitutional nations will disappear.” He was later assassinated. Both Serbs and Croats came to view violence as the only solution. The parallel is that should the federal government face a catastrophic collapse of legitimacy or capacity, the same type of “ethnic entrepreneurs” who stoked conflict in Bosnia would likely push for conflict among multiracial and multicultural groups inside the United States.