Matalam was born at the turn of the twentieth century in a small river town about two days by canoe from Cotabato City, the capital city on the coast. As the son of the region’s sultan, Matalam became a “datu” (chief), in keeping with the Muslim community’s tradition of inherited leadership. The Philippines was still a U.S. colony, and like others in his position, Matalam served as both a traditional leader to the locals and as a representative of the Manila-based national government. In 1914, he rose to assistant superintendent, overseeing Muslim activity in the farming community, and then to school inspector, ensuring that Muslim children were enrolled in colonial schools. Matalam was part of the first generation of datus who accepted colonialism. Indeed, he built his career by working with colonial administrators rather than against them.
Following his service in World War II, Matalam was appointed governor of Cotabato, the third largest administrative region in lush, tropical Mindanao. But even as he established himself as a strong and efficient administrator, keeping the province fiscally sound, the world was changing around him. In the past, outsiders hadn’t interfered much with the Moro people, as those native to the region are called. The population was sparse, and the locals were known as fierce and well-armed fighters. They were hard to subjugate. In 1946, the Philippines became independent, and Catholics increasingly began to migrate to Mindanao from the more populous north, encouraged by the central government, which wanted to develop Mindanao’s rich land for the economic benefit of the nation as a whole. The government transferred legal ownership of the best agricultural land to Catholic settlers and gave them loans to grow crops, along with other assistance not granted to local inhabitants. Many Muslims were physically thrown off land they had occupied for generations. So many Catholics migrated to Mindanao to take advantage of these benefits that by 1960, Catholics greatly outnumbered indigenous Muslims living in most parts of the region. Matalam went along with this, reaping the political and financial rewards of Manila’s favor. Meanwhile, a new generation of datus emerged. Unlike Matalam and his peers, these rising leaders had been born in the postcolonial era. They had some college education, usually acquired in Manila, and most were professionals (lawyers or educators). They were also more likely to have Catholic, not Muslim, wives. Their connection to Mindanao and its culture was not as strong.
And then in 1965, Ferdinand Marcos ran for president. After winning a bitter election in 1965, Marcos, a Catholic, moved to replace opposition officeholders with those who were loyal to him. Matalam went from a career as a revered provincial leader, a man at the center of power and influence, with deep knowledge of Muslim people and their culture, to a man with no power at all.
Matalam’s loss of political stature became painfully clear when an off-duty agent working in the Justice Department shot Matalam’s firstborn son in the summer of 1967. It was a terrible blow, made even worse when his colleagues failed to offer condolences. In a society where family and communal ties meant everything, Matalam understood that this was a deep insult. Matalam reacted by establishing the Muslim Independence Movement several months later, on May 1, 1968. He published a manifesto calling for all Muslim areas in the southern Philippines to secede and form their own “Republic of Mindanao and Sulu.”
The Moro people had a long history of demanding independence; in 1935, decades after the United States had claimed the Philippines, more than a hundred leading datus and local Muslim leaders sent a written declaration to Washington insisting on eventual separation from the country. They feared that they would lose their religion and culture within the much larger Catholic population and wanted to be free to worship and live as they saw fit. “Once our religion is no more,” they wrote, “our lives are no more.” Matalam’s manifesto, however, caused a spiral of fear-driven responses. Throughout the Philippines, the press carried headlines like “War Brews in Cotabato.” Marcos sent troops to the area. And some Catholic families chose to sell their property and leave Mindanao in anticipation of a Muslim uprising.
Matalam bowed out of the Muslim Independence Movement fairly quickly and instead retired to his farm. But the creation of the MIM had the unanticipated effect of inflaming both Muslims and Catholics, setting off a dangerous dynamic that propelled the country toward war. By early 1969, the MIM was training Muslim guerillas, likely financed by the Malaysian government, and by March 1970, sectarian violence had begun to break out. Catholic gangs began assaulting Muslim farmers and burning their homes, which provoked Muslims to retaliate. From there, conditions worsened, with Muslims accusing the government of encouraging Christian violence and Muslims forming their own armed bands. It was the classic “security dilemma,” in which people, fearing violence, arm themselves in self-defense, but in the process convince their enemy that they want war.
But what really tempted all-out conflict was Marcos’s decision to declare martial law in September 1972. The president portrayed the order as necessary to prevent further violence between Catholics and Muslims, but in fact he was using the unrest in the south to consolidate his own power. Marcos demanded that all Filipinos turn in any weapons within a month, including the swords and knives that were culturally important to Muslim men. Anyone who attempted to resist would be “annihilated.”
A few days before the weapons deadline, hundreds of armed Muslims attacked Marawi City, just north of Cotabato. About five hundred to one thousand Muslim rebels simultaneously attacked Mindanao State University, the provincial headquarters of the Philippine national police, and the Pantar Bridge, which connected Mindanao to the neighboring province. This was the first time the rebels fought as the newly constituted Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), a more extreme militant group that had split off from the MIM. The rebels failed to spark a popular uprising, but they fled to the southern part of the island, where they reconsolidated and continued the war, now using guerrilla tactics. The group first attacked government forces, then widened its targets to include civilians, as well as Roman Catholic bishops and foreigners who the group kidnapped for ransom.
Over the years, the group has spawned numerous offshoots, often battling with an even more militant radical Islamist group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). Almost every president since Marcos has attempted to end what has become one of the world’s longest civil wars, offering various degrees of autonomy for the region. In most cases, the government has not delivered on its promises, and various Moro groups have continued to fight, leading to the deaths of more than one hundred thousand people.
revolt of the Muslims in Mindanao? Part of the answer lies in the fact that the Philippines was becoming more of an anocracy. When Marcos took office in 1965, he inherited a political system that was almost democratic (with a polity score of +5). In the space of four years, he eroded it to the point where it was firmly in the anocracy zone (+2), and close to the tipping point for civil war. He did this by weakening individual and minority rights, expanding the power of the government, diminishing the rule of law, curtailing the independence of the judiciary, and removing numerous checks on presidential power. The Philippines had also become highly factionalized. Since the end of World War II, politics in the country had been dominated by local political clans (Catholics in the north and Muslims in the south) competing with each other for patronage from Manila.
And yet, there are lots of disgruntled ethnic groups living in factionalized anocracies, and most do not rebel. For example, Ethiopia has more than eighty different ethnic groups, practicing at least five major religions. But only a handful have ever organized to take on the government. And Indonesia is one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world, with over 360 tribal and ethno-linguistic groups, yet only four—the Ambonese, the East Timorese, the Acehnese, and the Papuans—have ever taken up arms. What is it about some groups that make them so motivated to fight?
Over the past three decades, scholars have zeroed in on an answer, drawing on several large datasets on nearly a century of civil wars. One of the first things they found, perhaps unsurprisingly, was that the groups that turn violent generally feel left out of the political process. They have limited voting rights and almost no access to government positions; they tend to be excluded from political power. But the most powerful determinant of violence, researchers discovered, was the trajectory of a group’s political status. People were especially likely to fight if they had once held power and saw it slipping away. Political scientists refer to this phenomenon as “downgrading,” and while there are many variations on the theme, it is a reliable way to predict—in countries prone to civil war—who will initiate the violence.
The Moro people of Mindanao had been gradually disempowered over the course of colonial rule and then again after they were incorporated into the Philippines. They had once governed their home region; their datus, sultans, and rajahs had made and enforced the laws, determined how land would be allocated, and decided which cultural practices would be honored. It was only after the Philippine government began to encourage the much larger Catholic population to migrate to Mindanao—displacing the Muslim locals—that the violence began. Matalam and many of his fellow Muslims were being downgraded, and the evidence of their lost status in terms of land ownership, job opportunities, and political power was all around them. They were losing their livelihood and their culture to people they saw as interlopers on their land.
Many modern civil conflicts follow this pattern. A study of eastern European countries over most of the twentieth century by Roger Petersen, a political scientist at MIT, found that a loss of political and cultural status fueled conflict in that region. Donald Horowitz, the political scientist at Duke who has studied hundreds of ethnic groups in divided societies, found the same thing. The ethnic groups that start wars are those claiming that the country “is or ought to be theirs.” Downgrading helps to explain why it was the Serbs and not the Croats or Bosniaks who started the civil war in Yugoslavia. Like the Moro people of Mindanao, the Serbs saw themselves as the rightful heirs to their country. They had once ruled themselves. They were the largest ethnic group in Yugoslavia when it was created, and they occupied most of the high-ranking positions in the Yugoslav military and bureaucracy. The Serbs initiated violence in Croatia and then Bosnia because they understood that they would lose significant power if both regions were allowed to secede. The Sunnis started the war in Iraq because they, too, had lost power after the American invasion. The Moro people, the Serbs, the Sunnis—all of them were downgraded, and all of them turned to violence.
Downgrading is a psychological reality as much as it is a political or demographic fact. Downgraded factions can be rich or poor, Christian or Muslim, white or Black. What matters is that members of the group feel a loss of status to which they believe they are entitled and are embittered as a result. In case after case, resentment and rage appear to drive a faction to war. The Stanford scholars Fearon and Laitin found that when the Sinhalese of Sri Lanka tried to make Sinhala the official language of the state, it “immediately caused a reaction among Tamils, who perceived their language, culture, and economic position to be under attack.” There is almost always a sense of injustice, a belief that whoever is in power doesn’t deserve to be there and has no right to that exalted position. Downgrading is a situation of status reversal, not just political defeat. Dominant groups go from a situation where, one moment, they get to decide whose language is spoken, whose laws are enforced, and whose culture is revered, to a situation where they do not.
Human beings hate to lose. They hate to lose money, games, jobs, respect, partners, and, yes, status. The psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky demonstrated this in a series of experiments in which they asked subjects if they would be willing to accept a gamble where they had a 50 percent chance of winning, say, $100, but an equal chance of losing $100. They found that most people refuse the gamble. The reason? Human beings are loss averse. They are much more motivated to try to reclaim losses than they are to try to make gains. People may tolerate years of poverty, unemployment, and discrimination. They may accept shoddy schools, poor hospitals, and neglected infrastructure. But there is one thing they will not tolerate: losing status in a place they believe is theirs. In the twenty-first century, the most dangerous factions are once-dominant groups facing decline.
Abkhazia, in Georgia, can trace their history in the region back to the sixth century B.C. They consider themselves the Indigenous people of the Caucasus and have no homeland outside of Georgia. Their small slice of this region, which lies just south of Sochi, is strikingly beautiful—mountains rising out of the emerald green waters of the Black Sea. Abkhazians have experienced periods of autonomy, but these have been followed by longer periods of conquest. Their rulers have included the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, neighboring Georgians, the Ottomans, and the Soviet Union. Despite these occupations, Abkhazians have retained their distinct culture, in part through an unwritten code of ethnic lore called apsuara (“Being Abkhazian”), which is passed down from generation to generation.
The twentieth century nearly brought the death of that culture. The first threat came when Joseph Stalin tried to wipe out ethnic Abkhaz rule by executing the Abkhaz elite, imposing elements of Georgian script on the native language, and moving tens of thousands of ethnic Georgians into Abkhazia. In the late 1980s, a second threat emerged when the Soviet Union began to dissolve and Georgians pushed for independence. Like the Moro people in the Philippines, Abkhazians feared that Georgians would remove the protected minority status they had secured after Stalin’s death.
When that fear came true, they took up arms. In July 1992, a little more than a year after Georgia gained independence, the Abkhazian people rebelled against incursions on their culture and language by declaring their own independence, triggering a conflict in which Abkhazian fighters, with Russian military support, sought to cleanse the region of ethnic Georgians. Thousands of Georgians and Abkhazians were killed, with many more wounded and displaced. By the end of the conflict, Abkhazians, who had once composed 19 percent of the local population, made up half of it. Control of the region was once again theirs.
Groups like the Abkhazians are what experts call “sons of the soil,” and many of the downgraded ethnic groups that go to war fit this mold. They are indigenous to a region or play a central role in its history. They think of themselves as the rightful heirs to their place of birth and deserving of special benefits and privileges. These groups are dominant because of majority status or because they inhabited or conquered the territory first. They consider themselves the “native” people, and all others who have settled there, or whose mother tongue is not the territory’s main language, are declared “outsiders.” In one study of civil wars since 1800, ethnic groups that fall into the “sons of the soil” category rebelled at a rate of 60 percent, roughly twice the rate (28 percent) of those that did not. These groups are dangerous because they tend to be more capable of organizing a resistance movement, and their sense of grievance can be overwhelming. Both are primary factors in who sparks civil wars.
In their dominance, sons of the soil can easily lose sight of their privilege because it is so pervasive; it just seems natural. Their elders are the leaders of the country or their region; they make political decisions for the population as a whole. Their language is the “official”—and often only—state language. It is their cultural practices and symbols that are celebrated, their holidays that are recognized, their religious schools that get preferential treatment. But when a new group begins to arrive in large numbers, the ground shifts. Outsiders bring their own culture and their own languages. In time, they can swamp the local population. Papuans, for example, lived their whole lives in the rich forests of Western New Guinea, entirely self-sufficient politically and economically. All this changed when they were forced to join Indonesia, and migrants from Java, Sulawesi, and Bali began to move in. In 1965, Indigenous Papuans formed the Free Papua Movement, seeking independence. In 1971, the group declared a “Republic of West Papua” and drafted a constitution. And in 1977, the group began a low-intensity guerrilla war, first targeting the main foreign-owned copper mine in the region, and then expanding to attack Indonesia’s military and police, along with non-natives living in West Papua. Since the war began, an estimated one hundred thousand Papuans have died.
Native speakers of a country’s official language enjoy a huge economic advantage over citizens whose language is not recognized by the state. Francisco Franco, dictator of Spain from 1939 to 1975, understood this. One of the ways Franco consolidated power was to elevate Castilian over other languages, declaring it Spain’s only official tongue. He then banned citizens from speaking Basque, Catalan, Galician, or any other language in public. Newborns were not allowed to be given regional names, and dialects were no longer allowed to be taught in school or used to conduct business. Language, it turns out, is strongly tied to the identity of a nation, and it determines whose culture ultimately dominates. One of the main fears of ethnic Russians in the Donbas region of Ukraine was that the new nationalist government would make Ukrainian the official language of the state to the exclusion of Russian. It’s hard to compete for well-paying jobs if you don’t speak the language. Controlling access to education, especially higher education, is another way to elevate one ethnic group over another. The same is true of access to civil service jobs, which are some of the most steady and lucrative positions in a country. When people face the loss of such privileges, they can become deeply aggrieved and motivated to resist.
In democracies, sons of the soil groups are most commonly downgraded by simple demographics—some combination of migration and differences in birth rates. Democratic elections are ultimately head counts, and, as Donald Horowitz observed, “numbers are an indicator of whose country it is.”
In Assam, a mountainous region of northeast India known for its tea plantations, local Assamese (who were predominantly Hindu) watched as ethnic Bengalis (who were predominantly Muslim) immigrated into their area from neighboring Bangladesh starting in 1901, steadily increasing their numbers throughout the century. The first migrants were brought in by the British colonial government intent to settle the sparsely populated and fallow land. Britain encouraged two types of Bengalis to migrate: low-skilled farmers who were predominantly Muslim, and educated Bengali Hindus who could help Britain administer the government as civil servants. But migration continued even after India became independent in 1947, to the increasing dismay of the Assamese. Between 1971 and 1981, the region took in as many as 1.2 million migrants, the highest influx of immigrants per capita of any region in India.
The local Assamese grew increasingly worried. Their first concern was cultural. As more and more immigrants arrived from Bangladesh, Bengali increasingly became the language of choice—at home, in business, and in government—and Bengali culture became a more prominent part of everyday life. The Assamese didn’t want to become a linguistic minority in their own homeland. The second concern was political. The Assamese won control over the regional government when the British left, and they knew they would be able to maintain power only if they remained a majority of the population. The influx of immigrants threatened to turn them into a minority and end their control over the state. The third concern was economic. Assam was far less populated than neighboring Bangladesh, and much of the land was unoccupied and ripe for new settlers. The migrant farmers quickly began to cultivate and occupy these lands, while the better educated Bengali Hindus gained coveted jobs in the bureaucracy. As time passed, these immigrants enjoyed a higher standard of living than the native Assamese.
The Assamese responded by organizing and creating an ethnic faction that attempted to exclude Bengalis and Muslims from what they saw as their rightful space. Assamese political leaders made Assamese the official language of the state in 1960, making it harder for Bengali speakers to compete for state jobs. They also made it the language of instruction in state schools, creating an additional barrier for Bengalis. Finally, Assamese were given preferential treatment in state administrative jobs. But the migrants kept coming. And when Assam’s election commissioner reported an unexpectedly large increase in new names on the electoral rolls (most of them Bengalis) prior to the 1979 parliamentary elections, the Assamese suddenly saw their worst fears confirmed: By allowing these immigrants to enter the country and vote, the national government in Delhi—over a thousand miles away—appeared to be encouraging the transformation of Assam.
For the first time in its history, the proportion of Bengalis was increasing, while the proportion of Assamese was declining. Bengalis had long outnumbered Assamese in the region’s major cities, where Bengali had become the dominant language. In the words of Myron Weiner, late professor at MIT and an expert on anti-immigration movements, “For the Assamese, the towns of Assam had become centers of alien life and culture.” But the change was now evident in the rural areas, as well, leaving no place untouched.
The surge in new voters revealed not only that the region’s demographics were rapidly changing, but that the political landscape was likely to change as well. One of the main problems for the Assamese was that it was quite easy for foreigners to become citizens and vote. At the time, India granted citizenship to three categories of people: those who were born in the country, those who had at least one parent who was born in the country, and those who had lived in India for at least seven years. So if someone had entered Assam illegally from Bangladesh but had lived there for almost a decade, he or she could become a citizen. Not surprisingly, India’s dominant political party—the Congress Party—encouraged both legal and illegal immigration because many of these foreign nationals, including many Bengalis, supported the party; the Assamese did not.
For the Assamese, fixing the problem was difficult. It was not clear how the government, even if it were willing, could reliably determine who of the many foreign-born Bengalis were legal: India did not have a single identity card that included citizenship status, and large numbers of mostly poor people did not even have birth certificates. Legal Bengalis were indistinguishable from non-legal Bengalis.
The Assamese responded by organizing a resistance movement.
In 1979, student leaders from Assam’s middle class created the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU), which articulated a new set of demands: Foreign nationals who had arrived between 1951 and 1961 would be given citizenship. The many immigrants who had come between 1961 and 1971 would be relocated to other parts of India but would not be given citizenship. Everyone who had arrived after 1971 would be deported. It was, in effect, a form of ethnic cleansing, whereby the Assamese would ensure their political and cultural dominance. (Their goal was ostensibly to expel “illegal immigrants,” but Bengalis as a whole—whether legal or illegal—were targeted.) The government ignored these demands, leading to the formation of an even more radical group—the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA)—which used militia techniques to target civilians through bombings and assassinations of officials and businessmen. The ULFA even threatened secession. But the governing Congress Party had no incentive to deport Bengalis—who tended to vote for Congress Party candidates—or even restrict immigration. It certainly had no incentive to grant independence.
The leaders of the AASU—who were mostly urban, middle-class, and well educated—used fear and xenophobia to convince rural Assamese that Bengali immigrants were taking valuable land and jobs, creating an undue burden on resources, and exhausting the farmlands. They called immigration “an invasion” and portrayed the movement as a struggle for cultural, political, and demographic survival. Conspiracy theories proliferated that Bangladesh was encouraging migration in order to eventually make Assam part of their state.
At first, the targets of Assamese ire—Bengali immigrants, both Hindu and Muslim—remained quiet, despite increasing acts of violence against them. But by 1980, they had begun to form their own groups to oppose deportation. The All Assam Minority Students Union (AAMSU) was formed in May 1980, demanding that all immigrants who had come to Assam prior to 1971 be granted citizenship and that harassment against minorities stop. Violent clashes broke out between AASU and AAMSU supporters, and there were reports of terrorist attacks on state officials and state property.
A critical moment in the lead-up to more organized violence was the 1983 election. Would the government compromise with the resistance movement and remove post-1971 immigrants from the electoral rolls, as the Assamese had demanded? When the government announced that it would continue to use the electoral rolls from 1979—those that included post-1971 immigrants, who the Assamese considered illegal—violence escalated. Assamese leaders called for a boycott of the election, and fighting broke out. According to Sanjib Baruah, an expert on Assam, the violence reflected the belief that the election was Assam’s “last struggle for survival.”
Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee, a young Bengali boy who was attending school at the time in the town of Maligaon in central Assam, recalls what it was like. There were roadside memorials on the road to Assamese “martyrs” that included signs written in Assamese saying, “We will give blood, not country.” There were also torchlit marches at night by the local Assamese. “We would sit in the darkness listening to them chant ‘Foreigners get out’ as they passed by our house.”
Violence reached its peak on February 18, 1983. At eight in the morning, local peasants and farmers from the area around a town called Nellie surrounded several Muslim villages, pounding drums and chanting “Long Live Assam.” Using machetes, spears, and homemade guns, they massacred as many as four thousand Bengali immigrants. Most of the people killed were women and children because, unlike the men, they could not outrun their attackers. Hundreds of thousands of additional individuals fled, many ending up in refugee camps.
The Nellie massacre, as it came to be called, was the desperate act of a downgraded population, one that felt threatened by a new demographic reality.
long confounded researchers who study civil war. Early statistical analyses seemed to find a correlation between per capita income and violence, and the wars themselves seemed to bear this out: Citizens in poor countries were much more likely to fight than citizens in rich countries. But when scholars took into account measures of good governance—including citizen participation, the competitiveness of elections, and constraints on the power of the executive—economic variables became much less important. Income inequality, which many considered a red flag for war, proved to be the opposite. As James Fearon wrote in a 2010 report for the World Bank, “Not only is there no apparent positive correlation between income inequality and conflict, but if anything, across countries, those with more equal income distributions have been marginally more conflict prone.”
This does not mean that economic factors are irrelevant or that income inequality doesn’t matter. After all, the economy plays a huge role in determining which ethnic groups feel left behind or diminished. Economic iniquities seem to aggravate existing anger and resentment. They also make it easier for those with wealth to suppress those without. The citizens living in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine lost their president in 2014 at the same time that they were losing manufacturing jobs. They were both politically excluded and uncertain about their economic future. The Assamese saw better jobs being given to newcomers. Similarly, the Moro people did not rise up until the government expropriated Muslim-owned lands and transferred them to Catholic settlers and foreign-controlled plantations. Local Muslims were politically powerless to respond. “Loggers came to despoil our beautiful hills and mountains,” complained one Moro leader in 1992. “They were followed by permanent settlers. And together they drove us…deep into the forest.”
Economic discrimination need not be deliberate for resentment to be felt. Modernization, the process by which rural, traditional societies are transformed into urban secular ones, favors citizens with the education and skills to compete in a mechanized world. Globalization has shifted manufacturing jobs to less developed countries while benefiting service-oriented workers (who happen to be disproportionately women). Sons of the soil tend to be disproportionately affected by these tectonic shifts: They frequently live in rural areas, far from a country’s economic, cultural, and political centers. They also tend to be poorer and less educated, and so more vulnerable to competition. The advantage they originally had—of being first on the land—not only disappears; it becomes a handicap. As the world moves on without them, they feel forgotten and ignored.
In the lead-up to the Yugoslavian civil war, Serbs in Bosnia were poorer than the region’s Croats and Bosniaks and had long resented the greater wealth of their city-dwelling compatriots. Serbs were looked down upon as being quasi-peasants, even though they were the more politically and militarily powerful group in a larger Yugoslavia. The Moro people were hurt economically by the loss of their land, but also because they could not compete with the better educated migrants moving in.
Indeed, immigration is often the flashpoint for conflict. Migrants come into a country and compete with poorer, more rural populations—sons of the soil—fueling resentment and pushing these groups toward violence. It is especially alarming, then, that the world is entering an unprecedented period of human migration, in large part due to climate change. As sea levels rise, droughts increase, and weather patterns change, more and more people will be forced to relocate to more hospitable terrain. By 2050, the World Bank predicts, over 140 million “climate migrants” will likely flee Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America. Experts have also warned that climate change is likely to lead to scarcity of resources, which could also fuel conflict. The Syrian war is an early example of this. Between 2006 and 2010, Syria experienced a devastating drought that, combined with the government’s discriminatory agricultural and water-use policies, resulted in significant crop failures. In search of opportunity, roughly 1.5 million people—mostly Sunni—migrated from the countryside to Syria’s cities. In the capital city of Damascus, the center of Christian Alawite power, these Sunnis were viewed as enemies of President Bashar al-Assad, and before long felt discriminated against because of their religion, creating resentment. When the government began to award water well-drilling rights on a sectarian basis, that anger intensified, accelerating the march to war.
Climate change will likely lead to a greater number of natural disasters that will disproportionately affect poorer, rural groups and create economic crises. It is during these times that citizens will feel the pain of discriminatory political and economic policies and inept governments most acutely. A 2016 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that armed conflict was more likely in ethnically fractionalized countries after climate-related disasters. Between 1980 and 2010, conflicts in almost a quarter of these countries coincided with climatic calamities that acted as threat multipliers. If a country was already at risk of civil war, natural disasters tended to make things worse. In a world where drought, wildfire, hurricanes, and heat waves will be more frequent and more intense—driving greater migration—the downgraded will have even more reasons to rise up.