How Civil Wars Start

Barbara F. Walter – professor of international relations at the University of California, San Diego – considers the common threads linking a century’s worth of civil wars in places as disparate as Spain, Syria and Bosnia, among others. She finds that America’s democracy is precariously close to collapse.

Between Autocracy and Democracy

Whether in Iraq, Syria or Northern Ireland, conflicts occur in societies with weakened and undermined democratic institutions, and in which out-of-power groups experience oppression and hopelessness.