The most painful loss came in 1922, when Irish Catholics who lived in the north were not given independence with the rest of Ireland. Britain created the Irish Free State—a newly independent country—but left the six counties of the north under British control. Even worse, Westminster revised the borders of Northern Ireland to ensure that Protestants—who identified as British—would make up two-thirds of the population. This meant that Protestants, not Catholics, would dominate the region’s new semi-autonomous government, controlling education, law, social services, industry, and agriculture—and Westminster was happy to allow them to rule as they pleased so long as they maintained law and order. Not only were the Irish Catholics of the north cut off from the rest of Ireland, but they were now a minority in their own native land. By the time Northern Ireland was created, their “conquest” by foreign interlopers was complete.
Protestants proceeded to enact a series of undemocratic laws designed to exclude Irish Catholics from power and deny them the best jobs, the best land, and the best homes. Northern Ireland, according to Sir James Craig, its first prime minister, would be “a Protestant state” whose chief aim was to serve the interests of the Ulster majority. One person, one vote did not exist in Northern Ireland despite it being part of the United Kingdom. In order to vote in local government elections, a person had to own a home, an arrangement that disproportionately benefited Protestants. Protestant-dominated city councils determined how housing was allocated; they favored Protestants and made Catholics wait years to own property. The councils also controlled government jobs, and Catholics often only had to mention their name or address to be rejected. Gary Fleming, an Irish Catholic, explained the system: “It was basically designed to treat my parents, me, the rest of my family and our families to come, as second-class citizens.” So while Irish Catholics in the newly independent Irish Free State to the south enjoyed freedom and equal rights before the law, Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland did not. Instead, they saw their circumstances decline over time, and they grew bitter.
Britain’s decision to let Protestants rule Northern Ireland as they liked allowed them to create a partial democracy that excluded one-third of the population. Irish Catholics did not have the same right to compete for power as Protestants. They were not offered the same protections or given the same resources. The system also had a larger effect. By favoring Protestants, it created two superfactions, because Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland were also divided politically, economically, and geographically. Protestants voted almost exclusively for unionist parties that wanted to remain part of the United Kingdom. Catholics voted almost exclusively for nationalist parties that wanted to become part of Ireland. Protestants dominated the professional and business classes, owning the majority of businesses and large farms. Catholics tended to be unskilled laborers working on the docks or in construction or on small farms. Catholics were poorer than Protestants and lived in separate enclaves in cities and separate regions in the country, and people from both communities sent their children to segregated schools. If you asked Protestants why Catholics were poorer, they generally believed it was because Catholics were lazy, irresponsible, and had too many kids. They did not think that systemic discrimination was to blame. But if you were Catholic, you understood that a vicious cycle had taken hold.
By mid-century, Northern Ireland had all the underlying conditions for civil war: partial democracy, competing identity-based factions, and a deeply rooted native population that was excluded from politics. But Catholics had felt the sting of discrimination and poverty for years—since 1922, in fact—and had resisted violence. They believed and hoped that their lives would improve.
That all changed in the summer of 1969. On August 12, more than ten thousand Protestants marched along the edge of the Bogside, an overcrowded working-class Catholic neighborhood in Derry, a town on Northern Ireland’s northwestern border. Hundreds of Protestants joined the march every year to commemorate the 1689 Siege of Derry, when Protestants repelled the attack of the deposed Catholic monarch James II. This year’s march, however, was meant to be particularly provocative. The Protestants wanted Irish Catholics—who were increasingly protesting against discrimination—to know their place. The marchers passed by the neighborhood as the men, women, and children from the Bogside watched. Pennies were thrown at the Catholic onlookers. Stones were thrown at the marchers. Soon, the Protestant-dominated Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), arrived and forced their way into the streets of the Bogside using batons and armored vehicles. The Catholics of the Bogside fought back, inspired in part by the civil rights protests in the United States. They continued to throw rocks at the police and the marchers as they entered the neighborhood. Soon they began to hurl homemade petrol bombs from roofs in what quickly became a riot. Residents of the Bogside weren’t surprised when the RUC returned the next day in combat gear and gas masks and blanketed the neighborhood with tear gas, and when the “B Specials”—masked paramilitary forces made up entirely of Protestants—were deployed to the scene. The Catholics knew the lengths to which Protestant leaders would go to hold on to their power.
On the third day of the riots, three hundred British soldiers arrived in Derry. Northern Ireland’s Protestant prime minister had requested them, fearing that his police were losing control. This was the first time London had directly intervened in Ireland since the island was partitioned, and the Catholics of the Bogside were thrilled. They welcomed the soldiers, convinced that they would protect them from the Protestant mobs and police forces. But that’s not what happened. The citizens of the Bogside soon understood that the British soldiers were there to help the Protestants, not the Irish Catholics. The soldiers were brutal, engaging in counterinsurgency tactics, conducting raids and searches of Catholic homes, and clashing with demonstrators. They treated the Catholics as the enemy, not as citizens with equal rights.
By the time a truce was called three days later, more than a thousand people had been injured, buildings had burned, and six people had been killed in riots that had broken out around the country (five in Belfast and one in Armagh). The Battle of the Bogside was the end of Irish peace. Catholics quickly organized protests around the region, and both sides became increasingly paranoid about the other’s intentions. According to journalists Patrick Bishop and Eamonn Mallie, “Catholics were convinced that they were about to become victims of a Protestant pogrom; Protestants that they were on the eve of an IRA insurrection.” British troops attempted to disarm Irish neighborhoods in Belfast, and the Irish responded with more riots. The Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA)—an Irish Catholic paramilitary organization—was formed to defend Catholic areas, but by October 1970 it had gone on the offensive. Initially it set off bombs in shops and businesses, but then it started to target British soldiers. It wanted Britain and its army out.
On January 30, 1972, a little more than two years after the first battle in the Bogside, British soldiers once again forced their way into the neighborhood. This time—on a day that has become known as Bloody Sunday—they shot twenty-six unarmed civilians, fourteen fatally. Irish Catholics had been peacefully protesting the Ulster government’s decision to jail Catholics without trial. British soldiers responded by shooting protesters in the back as they attempted to run away. “The Troubles,” as the civil war came to be called, had begun.
war. They had peacefully protested for decades to try to gain fair political representation and equal treatment in Northern Ireland. They had written letters, formed civil rights associations, and demonstrated in the street. They had held open-air meetings, sit-ins, and at one point in 1968 occupied Northern Ireland’s parliament in Belfast. In January 1969, they had organized a “Long March” from Belfast to Derry modeled on the march from Selma to Montgomery in the United States. But Protestants, through it all, had shown no interest in compromise. Nothing changed.
Before British soldiers arrived, Catholics had hoped that London’s more democratic government would rein in the worst tendencies of Northern Ireland’s Protestants. They knew that the region’s Protestants were determined to exclude them from power, but they also believed that Britain’s leaders were better, and fairer, than their own highly partisan, pseudo-democratic leaders. The British had not been the best overseers—they had been absentee rulers, distracted by other parts of their empire—but Catholics trusted that at the end of the day, the British would protect them.
The counterinsurgency tactics of the British soldiers revealed the truth, and it was at this point that the Catholics lost hope. By the time British soldiers began to bash heads in the Bogside, it was clear that peaceful protests would not work. All attempts to change the system, according to former Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams, “had failed.” Catholics saw that the British soldiers viewed them as separate and distinct—not to mention a threat because of their large numbers. The soldiers came to protect the Protestants, relative newcomers in a land the Irish had inhabited for millennia. Once Britain took the side of the Protestants and targeted the Catholics, hope died. It was all the evidence they needed to finally understand: Without violence, their fate was sealed.
Scholars know where civil wars tend to break out and who tends to start them: downgraded groups in anocracies dominated by ethnic factions. But what triggers them? What finally tips a country into conflict? Citizens can absorb a lot of pain. They will accept years of discrimination and poverty and remain quiet, enduring the ache of slow decline. What they can’t take is the loss of hope. It’s when a group looks into the future and sees nothing but additional pain that they start to see violence as their only path to progress.
People are fundamentally hopeful. They want to believe that their life, no matter how bad, will get better with effort. Hope makes the present more bearable and creates incentives for even the downtrodden to work within a system rather than burn it down. But hope requires uncertainty. Citizens can be hopeful because they don’t know how the future will unfold and, in their minds, they can anticipate something better. Irish Catholics were hopeful because they believed the British government would eventually step in to help them. Once British batons came out, there were no more illusions. Hope shrinks in the face of blatant government brutality. The Moro people of Mindanao lost hope that life would get better when President Marcos declared martial law and forcibly took their land and weapons. And the Catholics of Northern Ireland lost hope for peaceful reform when British soldiers treated them as intruders on their own soil.
As groups lose faith in the existing system, extremists often step in to offer an alternative. In Northern Ireland, it was the Provisional IRA. “People were in a hopeless situation until then,” said the influential Irish republican Danny Morrison, “and the IRA provided people with hope.”
a civil war in Syria. Syrian citizens had quietly watched as Arab Spring protesters flooded the streets in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, and Yemen, demanding change. They had seen Tunisia’s president, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, step down weeks after protests began, and Egypt’s longstanding dictator, President Hosni Mubarak, resign in the face of demonstrations. But they did not immediately join them because their own president, Bashar al-Assad, had masterfully used fear and intimidation to divide Syrians and aggressively suppress dissent.
And yet, the underlying conditions were there. Assad consistently promised his people that he would reform but then failed to deliver. He cemented sectarian politics by favoring his own Alawite tribe over the larger Sunni majority. This disparity—between Alawite and Sunni, rich and poor, urban and rural—revealed itself during a drought between 2006 and 2010. Most Syrians were Sunni and lived in the rural east of the country, but they were ruled by a wealthy urban Alawite elite who lived along the Mediterranean coast. When hundreds of thousands of rural Sunnis streamed into the poorer neighborhoods of Syria’s cities in the wake of the drought, Assad and the government did little to help them. Sunnis living in these new “misery belts” watched as government services and jobs were funneled to Alawite neighborhoods at their expense. They watched as government security forces harassed anyone who stepped out of line. (Youths in Daraa, inspired by other Arab awakenings, had been rounded up, tortured, and killed after writing in graffiti: “The people want the fall of the regime.”) Still, the uprisings in other countries gave Sunnis hope. If Tunisians, Egyptians, and Libyans could protest against their dictators, maybe they could, too.
When the protests began on March 15, 2011, Syrians were optimistic. They believed that their protests would work just as the protests in Tunisia and Egypt had worked. Initially, their demands were modest. They wanted the freedom to express themselves, the freedom to form opposition groups, and freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention. But the demands became more ambitious over time. Soon the protesters were demanding improved education, an end to sectarian discrimination in employment, and an end to pervasive government corruption.
Daraa, a city in southwestern Syria about a ten-minute drive to Jordan and a half-hour drive to Israel, became the early center of protests, sparked by the murder of the young graffiti artists. (When the children’s parents went to the station to inquire about them, they were told: “Forget about your children. Make more. And if you don’t remember how, bring us your wives and we’ll show you.”) On March 18, after coordinating on Facebook, Sunnis gathered at a mosque, one of the few places off-limits to military intelligence services. “Hurriyeh, Hurriyeh!” (“Freedom, freedom!”), they cried. They didn’t hide their faces or their phones as they videotaped the scene. They were confident that they would be safe inside the mosque. As they exited, thousands of demonstrators were waiting outside to join them. They weaved their way through the streets toward the regional government headquarters. They were tasting freedom for the first time and it was exhilarating.
But soon the protesters were met by Assad’s police and civil defense forces, who shot tear gas at the crowd. The protesters responded by throwing rocks. Tear gas and rocks, tear gas and rocks. In the late afternoon, the protesters began to see men without identification, wearing masks and black clothing. They were part of Assad’s elite security force, the General Security Directorate, and their goal was to disperse the crowd. At first, they fired their weapons into the air, but when that failed, sharpshooters started to pick off demonstrators one by one. The Sunnis sought refuge in a nearby mosque, which they turned into a hospital and meeting place. They wrote out their demands on white bedsheets that they hung outside the building. They still had hope that Assad would negotiate.
On the night of March 23, five days after the protests began, the lights in Daraa suddenly went out and cellphone service was cut. Soldiers armed with assault rifles stormed the mosque and opened fire on the peaceful protesters. Dozens were killed. A doctor and a paramedic who rushed over in an ambulance were killed by sharpshooters stationed outside. Sunnis across Syria responded to the attack by organizing protests across the country. “We were only chanting in the streets,” said one man in Aleppo. “We could have chanted for the rest of our lives without anyone even paying attention to us. But when the regime started attacking us, a lot of people who were on the sidelines started to join and protest, too. Because of the blood. Blood is what moves people.”
It didn’t take long for the Sunnis to lose hope. Syrians hadn’t known how President Assad would respond to the protests, but they believed he would be open to reform. After all, he was soft-spoken and erudite, had been partly educated in Britain, and claimed he was a new breed of reformist Arab leader. It was reasonable to think that he would be willing to compromise. But Assad’s response removed any doubt about his intentions. A week later, on March 30, he appeared on television to address Syrians for the first time since protesters took to the streets. A physician named Jamal gathered with a group of doctors and nurses in front of a TV in a hospital in Hama with a mix of anxiety and hope. Advisers to the president had hinted that Assad was planning to announce reforms and that imprisoned Daraa protesters would be released. Instead, Assad blamed the uprising on “terrorists” with extremist motives who were being supported by Syria’s enemies. He offered no concessions. “If you want war,” he said, looking straight into the camera, “we are ready for war.” Jamal and his colleagues, even those who supported Assad at the time, were shocked. “We couldn’t believe what we were hearing,” he said.
Assad’s belligerence set off an even greater surge of protests. The speech, according to Middle East expert David W. Lesch, was “the one that sent Syria in a trajectory toward a catastrophic war.” The demonstrations grew, becoming larger and angrier, and police and security forces became increasingly violent, beating protesters, firing live ammunition, and arresting tens of thousands of people. By the end of April, Daraa became one of the first cities to be surrounded by the Syrian army. Tanks were brought in and snipers were placed on rooftops. Security forces were dispatched to confiscate food and shut off power. Protesters responded by arming themselves. By June, some security officers had begun to defect, refusing to kill civilians, and by the end of July, a group of these officers announced that they had formed the Free Syrian Army (FSA). By September 2011, government troops repeatedly had to fend off rebel militia attacks. Sunnis had hoped that their protests would lead to a better life. But Assad’s speech and his brutal crackdown on Sunni citizens destroyed their faith in the future.
Protests per se don’t lead to civil war. In fact, protests are fundamentally about hope. Average citizens leave their homes and go out into the streets with sheets and placards and begin to chant because they believe their government will listen to them and their lives will improve. If people thought their government would shoot at them, they would either stay at home—too afraid to act—or they would come out guns blazing. Going out in the street with nothing but a cellphone is an act of optimism. It means that citizens still believe that the system will correct itself. If Assad had reformed in the face of protests, Sunnis would have packed up their signs and returned home.
It’s the failure of protests that eliminates hope and incentivizes violence. That’s when citizens finally see that their belief in the system has been misplaced. In Israel, Palestinians engaged in nonviolent protests for years—participating in mass demonstrations, work stoppages, strikes, and boycotts—but made no progress in negotiations with the government. The result? “People exploded,” said Radwan Abu Ayyash, a Palestinian journalist. This helps explain why violence tends to escalate in the aftermath of failed protests. Protests are a last-ditch effort to fix the system—the Hail Mary pass for optimists seeking peaceful change—before the extremists take over.
This is why civil wars are often preceded by years of peaceful protests. It’s not that protesters transform themselves into soldiers. It’s that the more militant members of an unhappy group come to feel that no other option exists and begin to mobilize armed resistance. “Remember,” Brendan Hughes, a member of the Provisional IRA, pointed out, “Irish people for hundreds of years have campaigned, fought elections, have tried every method to bring about their just aims. And every single time, the reaction from the British has been with violence.” It was only when peaceful protest didn’t work that the more extreme members of the faction were able to gain the upper hand. That’s when the kidnappings, assassinations, and bombings began. The most violent phase of the Arab-Israeli conflict—the second intifada—began only after the Camp David talks between Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat broke down in 2000. Algerians, for their part, had long engaged in general strikes, boycotts, and protests against systematic discrimination by the French before more militant citizens turned to terror. Failed protests are a sign that moderates and their methods have failed.
Both democracies and autocracies can handle protests with relative ease. When demonstrations broke out in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the Chinese government could carefully monitor student leaders, wiretap their meetings, and identify, capture, and punish anyone who participated in the protests. The government was also able to declare martial law and send as many as 250,000 soldiers to Beijing. Protests in the face of such overwhelming authoritarian power have great difficulty gaining ground. Healthy democracies are also less likely to experience failed protests since the system itself creates multiple avenues for compromise and accommodation.
But protests can be particularly destabilizing in anocracies, which are often too weak institutionally to root out extreme elements and respond in a measured way, and too fragile and unstable to guarantee real political reform. Countries in the middle zone provide the perfect conditions for the formation of violent extremist groups.
Protests can also cause problems in countries whose populations have factionalized. According to Erica Chenoweth, an expert on nonviolent resistance at Harvard, governments are more likely to negotiate—and less likely to crack down—when a protest group includes a wide assortment of a country’s population. The larger and more mainstream a protest group, the more likely it is to gain support from politicians. Ethnic or religious factions, especially superfactions, are not diverse—they represent one element of society and thus create fewer incentives for the government to compromise. One of the reasons why the civil rights movement in the United States was successful was that it was a true coalition. It included powerful allies in government, including President Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, as well as white liberals across the country. The same was not true of the Black Panthers, who were hunted down by the FBI in part because they were an exclusively African American organization. Ethnically exclusive factions that are out of power are easy to ignore politically. And they are easier to punish.
Protests are a warning sign. They indicate that citizens believe their system still works but is troubled. Since 2010, protests have surged around the world. There have been more protests in the last ten years than at any time since data began to be collected in 1900. In 2019 alone, political protests erupted on every continent and across 114 countries, including Chile, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, India, Bolivia, China, Spain, Russia, the Czech Republic, Algeria, Sudan, and Kazakhstan. Protests have increased the most in the countries deemed “free” by the nonprofit research institute Freedom House, including the liberal democracies of Western Europe and the United States.
What’s disturbing is that these protests are failing at a higher rate than ever before. In the 1990s, peaceful protests had a 65 percent success rate, meaning that they resulted in the overthrow of a government or the gaining of independence. But since 2010, the success rate has dropped to 34 percent. “Something has really shifted,” acknowledged Chenoweth. And this leaves the world’s oldest and freest democracies increasingly vulnerable.
dangerous moments in a country ripe for civil war. Elections can have the same effect. Ivory Coast’s transition to democracy and its series of early elections in the 1990s provide a good example. After gaining independence from France in 1960, the country was ruled by President Félix Houphouët-Boigny until 1993. Papa Houphouët, as he was affectionately called, helped to develop the coffee and cocoa industries. He also instituted a system of quotas designed to prevent any one ethnic group from politically dominating the others. The result was an economically prosperous and politically stable country.
All that changed when the country held its first multiparty election in 1990 and politicians, including President Houphouët-Boigny, began to use ethnic identity to generate political support. The president ran against the opposition leader Laurent Gbagbo, who accused Houphouët-Boigny of favoring the interests of his tribe, the Baoulé. The Baoulé were one of Ivory Coast’s largest ethnic groups and were concentrated in the south of the country. Houphouët-Boigny’s party, in turn, accused Gbagbo’s party of representing the interests of foreigners and ethnic groups from the north. Ethnic factionalism continued to plague the 1995 elections, with the opposition boycotting what they said were unfair electoral policies. Those in power excluded members of the opposition faction from government and further aggravated the north-south divisions in the country. Citizens of the north eventually rebelled in September 2002, in large part because they were excluded from power.
Elections are potentially destabilizing events in highly factionalized anocracies—especially when a downgraded group loses. In a study of global conflict between 1960 and 2000, researchers found that ethnic groups were more likely to resort to violence after they had lost an election. Elections preceded the civil war in Burundi in 1993, when the minority Tutsis—who controlled most of Burundi’s military—revolted after losing in the country’s first multiparty presidential and legislative elections. Ukraine’s civil war began in 2014 immediately after Petro Poroshenko won a special election designed to replace President Yanukovych, who was forced to resign in the face of mass protests. Yanukovych’s Russian-speaking supporters in eastern Ukraine reacted by declaring independence and taking up arms. And in the United States, it was the election of President Abraham Lincoln, the first president able to win power without the support of Southern Democrats, that convinced Southerners to secede.
Like protests, elections per se are not dangerous. In fact, most citizens are eager to participate in elections, seeing them as a hallmark of a democracy. Over 80 percent of Ivory Coast’s citizens participated in the elections that preceded its civil war. The same was true in Burundi, where over 93 percent of registered voters participated in their 1993 election. Elections give people hope. They focus citizens’ attention on the long game; people believe that even if they lose today, they could win tomorrow. And the more hopeful citizens are about the future, the more likely they are to try to peacefully work within the system.
But if the losing side believes that it will never gain or regain power, then hope disappears. America’s 1860 election was devastating to Southern Democrats because a candidate was able to win the White House without a single electoral vote from the once-powerful South. Republicans—whose platform included abolishing slavery—no longer needed to cater to Southerners in order to win office.
Elections provide important information about the future and thus reduce uncertainty. First, they shed light on a group’s ability to compete. Two consecutive losses indicate that a party does not have the votes to gain control and is thus likely to be excluded from power. Elections can be particularly destabilizing in winner-take-all systems. Presidential majoritarian systems are heavily biased in favor of the majority group in a country; if one party or faction cannot gain the support of a majority of citizens, it will never gain power. The Ivory Coast has the same presidential system as the United States, where the president gains power based on majority rule and is not only the head of state but also the head of government and the commander in chief of the armed forces. Winning an election in this type of system is particularly consequential. Afghanistan, Angola, Brazil, Burundi, Indonesia, Nigeria, the Philippines, Rwanda, and Venezuela all have the same type of presidential system, and all have experienced a high degree of political violence. One study revealed that all of the democracies that experienced civil war between 1960 and 1995 had majoritarian or presidential systems. None of them were based on proportional representation.
Ethnic factionalization in majoritarian systems makes elections even more fraught. When citizens coalesce around an ethnic faction, their electoral support becomes fixed and predictable. Everyone knows the likely result of an election because they can look at the country’s demographics and accurately guess how people will vote. Unless demographics change, the political system changes, or the faction becomes more inclusive, there is little reason to hope that political outcomes will be different.
Elections also provide information about the ruling party’s willingness to play fair. They reveal whether those in power are truly committed to democracy. If one side can manipulate the results of an election, and democratic checks and balances are too weak to enforce a peaceful transfer of power, then hope in fair competition is lost. The 1948 elections for a new assembly in Algeria was so heavily and openly rigged by French settlers to guarantee their victory that the phrase election algerienne became synonymous with unfair elections. A fraudulent election shows excluded groups that they have no conventional means to gain or regain access to authority now or in the future. The ability to rig an election makes a mockery of hope.
Elections themselves can lead to factionalization, encouraging politicians to “play the ethnic card”—a strategy whereby they consciously generate deep feelings of ethnic nationalism and grievance in order to mobilize the support necessary to bring themselves to power. The campaigning that leads up to an election also provides the critical infrastructure for rebellion, which requires groups to pull less politically engaged citizens into a larger movement. Campaigning for office is the process of uniting people under a particular ideology to compete for political power. In some ways, it is the peaceful precursor to armed mobilization. Once elections take place, party leaders have a ready-made band of supporters, some of whom may be willing to fight. The line separating an organized political faction from an armed faction can be dangerously thin—particularly in countries where weapons are easily accessed and distributed.
Elections can strengthen a country, bringing citizens together in a meaningful act of civic duty. They can renew faith in institutions and reaffirm the power of a person’s vote. But they can also provide painful evidence of a group’s declining status, causing its members to lose hope for future representation—and convincing them they have nothing to lose by fighting.
sometimes traced to a single incident: a trigger. Sometimes it’s an election, sometimes a failed protest, sometimes a natural disaster. In the Philippines, it was the isolated massacre of Muslim army recruits by other service members. In Lebanon, it was the killing of a Christian man on his way to his son’s wedding. Guatemala’s civil war escalated in part after a devastating earthquake revealed just how inept and corrupt the government was. But these flashpoints have long backstories. Most of the time, civil wars start with small bands of extremists—students, exiled dissidents, former members of the military—who care more deeply about power and politics than the average citizen.
The men, women, and children who rioted in the Bogside didn’t start Ireland’s civil war. The war was started by the radicals who created the Provisional Irish Republican Army. The founders of the paramilitary group, including Seán Mac Stíofáin, Seamus Twomey, and Joe Cahill, had met for decades before planning their first attack. In the American Civil War, so-called Minute Men militias—who modeled themselves after the Revolutionary War–era patriots—began to crop up throughout the South as early as the 1830s, decades before the Civil War broke out. These militias were organized by small groups of radical secessionists, almost all of whom were white plantation owners, who wanted to build support for Southern independence. It took them years to rally the white working class to their cause. Even in Syria—which most people think of as an explosive civil war that emerged from the Arab Spring protests—the organizers of the Free Syrian Army had been meeting in Turkey for almost six months before they started to fight. By the time average citizens are aware that a militant group has formed, it is often older and stronger than people think.
Governments can become inadvertent recruiters for militant groups. Multiple studies have found that if a government responds with brutal force to the early mobilization of an extremist group, local support for even unpopular groups increases. A government’s attack on its own citizens has the power to transform the man on the street into a radical. Abu Tha’ir, an engineer in southwestern Syria, described how this worked in Daraa. When government forces stormed the al-Omari mosque after the city’s lights were shut off, killing dozens of Syrians, local villagers heard about the shooting and came to Daraa to beg for peace. Instead of ignoring them, or talking with them, the security forces opened fire, slaughtering civilians from every village in the region. “If I ever write a book about this,” Abu Tha’ir said, “I’ll call it How to Spark a Revolution in One Week.”
Early militants, of course, know that civilian deaths at the hands of the government can tip conflicts into all-out war; they see the opportunity in a harsh government response and plan accordingly. Hamas has stored weapons in schools, mosques, and residential neighborhoods, goading the Israeli military to bomb them. Carlos Marighella, a Brazilian Marxist revolutionary, urged fellow militants to target government forces in order to provoke a violent reaction. He believed that if the government intensified its repression against Brazilians, arresting innocent people and making life in the city unbearable, citizens would turn against it. In Northern Ireland, Tommy Gorman, a member of the IRA, recalled that the British Army and government, with their harsh tactics, “were our best recruiting agents.” And in Spain, the violent separatist group ETA was not particularly popular with Basque citizens until President Franco allowed the Germans, during World War II, to viciously bomb Basque villages. According to one expert on the Basques, “Nothing radicalizes a people faster than the unleashing of undisciplined security forces on its towns and villages.” That’s why civil wars appear to explode after governments decide to play hardball. Extremists have already embraced militancy. What changes is that average citizens now decide that it’s in their interest to do so as well.
Violent extremists can also take advantage of peaceful protest movements to sow chaos. Erica Chenoweth calls these people violent conflict entrepreneurs. They try to hijack a social movement by nudging it toward violence. Partly this is designed to provoke a harsh counterattack by the government, but partly it is designed to generate fear and insecurity among the protesters themselves, convincing more moderate members that they need to take up arms. Suddenly, average citizens are seeking the services of extremists, certain that those pursuing peaceful means cannot protect them. Leaders may not even be aware they are creating this security dilemma. When Tudjman redefined Serbs as a minority within Croatia and asked them to take an oath of loyalty, he likely didn’t understand the degree to which this made Serbs fearful and pushed them into the waiting arms of Milošević. In the face of such fears, the more radical members of the group often win.
So why wouldn’t governments, especially democratic governments, yield to protesters if it helped them avoid war? One answer is that some governments believe their very survival is at stake. From Assad’s perspective, democracy in Syria would have paved the way for Sunni rule, leaving him and his Alawite supporters pariahs or worse. Assad had seen what had happened to Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya when they stepped down from power. He was not going to do the same.
Other leaders of multiethnic countries become convinced that only conflict can hold the country together. In a study of self-determination movements between 1955 and 2002, I found that leaders were less inclined to negotiate—and more likely to fight—in nations with multiple potential separatist groups. If a leader believed that granting independence to one group would lead others to make their own demands—setting off a secessionist chain reaction—then fighting would help deter future challenges. Indonesia’s harsh response to East Timor’s declaration of independence, which killed an estimated 25 percent of East Timor’s population, was made in part to dissuade the country’s many other ethnic groups from demanding independence as well.
Key government constituencies—a ruling elite, a voting base, the military brass—can also nudge a country toward conflict. Leaders who are beholden to any or all of these groups might find themselves taking, rather than giving, orders. The French government chose not to grant Algeria independence without first fighting a war because politically powerful French settlers living in Algeria, together with the support of French army officers, rejected compromise. (French Algerians controlled the interior ministry, which controlled the police.) Communist Party leader Zhao Ziyang had favored compromising with the Tiananmen Square demonstrators, but Communist Party hard-liners threw him out of power—claiming he was being soft—and instead pursued a military response.
Ignorance can also lead governments to overreact, triggering wider conflict. Studies have shown that governments are especially likely to over-respond in regions where a weak on-the-ground presence has left them out of touch and stripped of influence. According to Jonathan Powell, the chief British negotiator on Northern Ireland, the British “really had no idea what was going on in Northern Ireland….Their intelligence was out of date. They locked up the wrong people.” But by resorting to violence, the British not only destroyed Catholics’ faith in the possibility of reform, they delivered them into the open arms of the Provisional IRA.
It’s never clear how a government is going to respond to sustained protests. Emotions run high, unexpected events occur. Intransigence and fear set in. People on both sides demand and seek revenge. That’s why the early acts of terror by members of a downgraded group are often more dangerous than people realize. Violence entrepreneurs are playing a bigger game. And in the early decades of the twenty-first century, these extremists who hope to provoke war have an extraordinarily powerful new weapon at their disposal. It’s cheap, it’s fast, it’s remarkably good at generating anger and resentment, and most people are not yet fully aware of its peril: social media.