Finding the root causes of civil wars is critical, the researchers stress, because they are so devastating. Since the end of World War II, About civil wars have raged since , compared with 25 conventional wars.
Internal conflicts last six years on average and bring about widespread refugee dislocations and economic devastation -- as seen in Afghanistan, Somalia and Lebanon. Despite this heavy toll, the professors say, civil wars have been studied far less than conventional conflicts and are not properly understood. Fearon and Laitin have detailed their findings in a paper titled "Ethnicity, Insurgency and Civil War" that will be published early next year in the American Political Science Review.
They argue that the prevalence of internal war is mainly the result of the accumulation of protracted postcolonial conflicts since the s and s, rather than a sudden change associated with the post-Cold War international system. The number of civil conflicts has increased over time because they break out faster than they end -- on average, 2.
Based on data on civil wars from to , Fearon and Laitin argue that, after controlling for per capita income, ethnically or religiously diverse countries have been no more likely to experience significant civil violence than more homogenous states.
The criterion for including an insurgency in the study is a minimum of deaths annually and 1, during the course of the conflict. Consequently, the Basque conflict in Spain and France is not included because people have died during its three-decade-long campaign for an independent homeland.
Grievances such as economic inequality, lack of democracy or civil liberties, or state discrimination against minority religions or languages are less effective predictors of civil conflict than weak states marked by poverty, large size and instability, Fearon and Laitin explained.
Instead, the paper noted, "The factors that explain which countries have been at risk for civil war are not their ethnic or religious characteristics but rather the conditions that favor insurgency. Enemies of the state come to displace the loyal opposition, with those having been inside another tribe seen as the most disloyal. Often, it is apostates, the former adherents of the faith, that are targeted more readily over infidels, those who had always been on the outside.
It is hard not to see echoes of this dynamic at play as Republicans condemn other Republicans over their loyalty or lack thereof to former U. President Donald Trump. Indeed, the United States now displays all three core elements that can lead to civil breakdown. They could either compete with good ideas or resort to emphasizing respect for authority over critical thinking, restricting voter franchise, and making it easier to convert wealth into votes.
The Republican Party chose the easier path. The GOP knows it could lose everything in a fair fight one-person, one-vote , so it built a powerful infrastructure to tilt the local, state, and federal playing fields. To make matters worse, as house speaker from , Newt Gingrich innovated a brilliant and democracy-destructive strategy for enabling his party to keep punching above its popular weight in the electorate: Just say no.
Either Gingrich got everything he wanted or he refused to play. As former Senate majority leader, Sen. In time, the tribalism that naturally divided the two parties began to escalate into sectarianism. The gridlock across the federal government became yet another argument for shifting power to more conservative states. It also convinced many U. Democrats too were caught in this vicious process, unable to maneuver and compromise to move forward. With the legislative branch locked, executive orders by the president became a mainstay of policymaking.
Bush, and Bill Clinton issued , , respectively in their eight years in office. Neither the escalation to sectarianism nor the rise of more authoritarian national executives would have been possible without a severely damaged information space.
The s also saw the rise of cable news and the ongoing shift from broadcasting to narrowcasting. In the old world, professional journalism supported a shared conception of reality.
The information space has been further compromised by powerful foreign adversaries and omnipresent tech companies. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev later admitted and apologized for that one. That lie, and its destructive impact, took six years to come to fruition. So is the United States on the brink of a civil war?
The Union victory at Antietam would prove decisive, as it halted the Confederate advance in Maryland and forced Lee to retreat into Virginia. Lincoln had used the occasion of the Union victory at Antietam to issue a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation , which freed all enslaved people in the rebellious states after January 1, He justified his decision as a wartime measure, and did not go so far as to free the enslaved people in the border states loyal to the Union.
Still, the Emancipation Proclamation deprived the Confederacy of the bulk of its labor forces and put international public opinion strongly on the Union side. Some , Black Civil War soldiers would join the Union Army by the time the war ended in , and 38, lost their lives.
The Confederates gained a costly victory in the Battle of Chancellorsville , suffering 13, casualties around 22 percent of their troops ; the Union lost 17, men 15 percent. Over three days of fierce fighting, the Confederates were unable to push through the Union center, and suffered casualties of close to 60 percent.
Also in July , Union forces under Ulysses S. Grant took Vicksburg Mississippi in the Siege of Vicksburg , a victory that would prove to be the turning point of the war in the western theater. Despite heavy Union casualties in the Battle of the Wilderness and at Spotsylvania both May , at Cold Harbor early June and the key rail center of Petersburg June , Grant pursued a strategy of attrition, putting Petersburg under siege for the next nine months.
For most of the next week, Grant and Meade pursued the Confederates along the Appomattox River, finally exhausting their possibilities for escape.
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Though neither the Union nor the Confederacy had a formal military intelligence network during the Civil War, each side obtained crucial information from spying or espionage operations. From early in the war, the Confederacy set up a spy network in the federal capital of These units had tenuous ties to the regular Confederate and Union Armies and were Civil War culture in America—both North and South—was greatly distinct from life in the antebellum years.
The Civil War was a time of great social and political upheaval. It was also a time of great technological change. Inventors and military men devised new types of weapons, such as the repeating rifle and the submarine, that forever changed the way that wars were fought.
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