The room was a jumble of filing cabinets, dog crates, and vacuum parts. Fox was a frustrated man—and not just because he was practically homeless. This wasn’t the first time he had been down on his luck. After graduating from high school, he’d struggled to find a path, working as a contractor for Vac Shack and barely able to pay his bills. He was angry at the Democratic leaders who had let this happen; he often tweeted about Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi to let off steam. He’d recently found some camaraderie when he’d joined a local militia, but then he’d been kicked out for his anti-government rants and altercations with other members.
Now COVID-19 was spreading. It had hit Detroit and Grand Rapids so hard that on March 23, 2020, Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, had called for a state lockdown. Her stay-at-home orders extended even to rural areas with few cases. In late April—after yet another round of restrictions—Fox had donned a baseball cap and tactical vest to join hundreds of protesters, many of them armed, to march on the capitol in Lansing. He’d listened outside as Mike Detmer, a Republican congressional candidate, railed against the restrictions as un-American. “We are in a war for the hearts, the soul, the traditions, and the freedom of our state and country,” Detmer had declared. “It is up to us to end the shutdown.” Afterward, when protesters forced themselves into the capitol to occupy the House floor, Fox had joined them.
But none of this had really changed things, and as more weeks went by, Fox grew restless. That June, he livestreamed a video on Facebook, complaining about recent gym closures and calling Whitmer a “tyrant bitch” who loved power. “I don’t know, boys. We gotta do something,” he said into the camera. Soon afterward, he reached out over Facebook to Joseph Morrison, the leader of a local militia, the Wolverine Watchmen. Morrison allegedly agreed to help Fox recruit, train, and arm a new paramilitary group. Soon Fox was gathering other men to his cause. One who joined was a retired rifleman in the Marine Corps who had won the Humanitarian Service Medal, the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, and the Marine Corps Good Conduct Medal. Another had previously started basic training with the Michigan National Guard but had not completed it. One was affiliated with the Three Percenters militia group; another supported QAnon; another followed the social media accounts of the Proud Boys.
There were fourteen of them. Many of the men, like Fox, had attended anti-lockdown rallies. They began meeting in the basement of Vac Shack, where Fox would confiscate cellphones so no one could record the conversations. They also met on Morrison’s one-acre rural property for tactical and firearms training. Every Sunday afternoon they would fire hundreds of rounds and practice building explosives.
They considered storming the state capitol—they could take lawmakers hostage, then execute them over the course of a few days. They also considered locking the doors of the capitol and setting the building on fire with everyone inside. Eventually, because the capitol was so well protected, they settled on a different plan: kidnap Whitmer at her vacation home in northern Michigan sometime before the November 2020 election. They would take her to a hidden place in Wisconsin, put her on trial for treason, and kill her.
That August and September, the men spied on Whitmer’s home, looking for a nearby bridge to detonate as a way to distract law enforcement agents when they launched their plan. But the FBI was on to them. After discovering the group’s activity on social media in early 2020, agents had infiltrated the group online and recruited informants who agreed to wear a wire or gather information. By September, despite Fox’s precautions, the FBI had gathered more than thirteen thousand pages of encrypted text messages, as well as photographs, videos, and more than one hundred hours of audio evidence of the kidnapping plot. On the night of October 7, 2020, the feds closed in with a sting: When a handful of the plotters met for what they thought was a weapons buy, they were arrested instead. The FBI raided the Vac Shack basement and executed search warrants in more than a dozen locations. The fourteen men, including Fox, were slapped with terrorism, conspiracy, and weapons charges. The owner of Vac Shack, meanwhile, grappled with his disbelief. “I knew he was in a militia,” he told reporters, “but there’s a lot of people in a militia that don’t plan to kidnap the governor. I mean, give me a break.”
In the wake of the arrests, news reports focused on the true aims of the would-be kidnappers. Even though Michigan leaders, both Democrat and Republican, condemned the plot, President Donald Trump criticized Whitmer, tweeting that she had “done a terrible job” as governor. Fox himself, however, left no doubt about the group’s motives. The trial and execution of Whitmer, he’d explained in FBI recordings, were designed to inspire others to carry out similar attacks. The time had come for a revolution, and he and his men would provoke a societal collapse. “I just wanna make the world glow, dude,” he told an informant. “That’s what it’s gonna take for us to take it back.”
read about the plot to kidnap Whitmer in the fall of 2020, I was alarmed but not altogether surprised. It fit into a pattern I had been writing and thinking about for decades. There have been hundreds of civil wars over the past seventy-five years, and many of them started in an eerily similar way. As a scholar and an expert on civil wars, I have interviewed members of Hamas in the West Bank, ex–Sinn Féin members in Northern Ireland, and former members of FARC in Colombia. I have stood on top of the Golan Heights and stared into Syria during the height of the Syria civil war. I have driven across Zimbabwe as the military was planning its coup against Robert Mugabe. I have been followed and interrogated by members of Myanmar’s junta. I’ve been at the wrong end of an Israeli soldier’s machine gun.
I first started studying civil wars in 1990, and at the time, there was very little data to work with. You could read a lot of books by scholars on civil wars in Spain, Greece, Nigeria, and even America in the nineteenth century, but there were almost no studies that looked at common elements that repeated themselves across countries and over time. Everyone thought their civil war was unique, and so no one saw the risk factors that emerged again and again no matter where war broke out.
But within a few years, our knowledge had expanded. The Cold War was over, and all over the globe, civil wars were erupting. Scholars around the world began collecting data—lots of data—on various aspects of these conflicts. The biggest data collection project is now housed at Uppsala University, in Sweden. It was built in collaboration with the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, Norway (PRIO), and has been funded over the years by the Swedish Research Council, the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, the Norwegian government, and the World Bank. Carefully trained researchers work together with a network of experts on different countries to collect the data. Today, anyone can access dozens of high-quality datasets (the results are triple-checked) related to how civil wars start, how long they last, how many people die, and why they fight. Scholars have used this data to uncover patterns and risk factors that help us predict where and when civil wars are likely to break out. What can we expect to see in the future, given the patterns we have seen in the past? It’s a whole new world of understanding.
In 2010, an article published in the American Journal of Political Science caught my attention. Written by a team of academics, it featured the work of researchers who belonged to something called the Political Instability Task Force (PITF), a group of academics and data analysts who were asked to convene at the behest of the U.S. government in 1994. These experts at the PITF had taken civil war data from around the world and built a model that could predict where instability was most likely to occur.
The idea that researchers could predict civil conflict was revolutionary. And so in 2017, when I was asked to join the PITF myself, I did not hesitate. Almost every year since then, I’ve attended meetings and conferences with other scholars and analysts, in which we study political volatility around the world—the potential collapse of Syria, the future of African dictators—and come up with ways to further refine the predictive possibilities of the data at our fingertips. Our goal has always been to try to anticipate violence and instability in other countries, so that the United States is better prepared to respond.
But as I’ve done this work, I’ve realized something unnerving: The warning signs of instability that we have identified in other places are the same signs that, over the past decade, I’ve begun to see on our own soil. This is why I witnessed the events in Lansing—as well as the assault on the U.S. Capitol in January 2021—with such trepidation. I’ve seen how civil wars start, and I know the signs that people miss. And I can see those signs emerging here at a surprisingly fast rate.
The plot in 2020 by a group of white nationalist, anti-government militias in Michigan is one of those signs. Civil war in the twenty-first century is distinctly different from civil wars of the past. Gone are the large battlefields, the armies, and the conventional tactics. Today, civil wars are waged primarily by different ethnic and religious groups, by guerrilla soldiers and militias, who often target civilians. The unrest in Michigan, if you look closely, features these very elements. The state is deeply divided along racial and geographic lines: Two of its major cities, Detroit and Flint, are predominantly African American, while its rural areas are 95 percent white. Economic decline in the state has created deep personal discontent, especially among its rural residents, which has led to anger, resentment, and radicalization. Michigan also has a strong anti-government culture and one of the highest numbers of militias of any state, creating ready-made units for violence. It is no surprise that one of the first attempts to instigate a civil war happened here.
That a kidnapping attempt by a group of far-right extremists is a sign of impending civil war may strike you as preposterous. But modern civil wars start with vigilantes just like these—armed militants who take violence directly to the people. Militias are now a defining feature of conflicts around the world. In Syria, anti-government rebels were a hodgepodge of insurgents and freed prisoners, fighting alongside the violent extremist group ISIS. Even Syria’s largest early rebel faction—the Free Syrian Army—was a mix of hundreds of small loose-knit groups, rather than a centrally led organization. Ukraine’s current civil war is being fought by bandits, warlords, private military companies, foreign mercenaries, and regular insurgents. The same is true in Afghanistan and Yemen. The era of a single, regimented, and hierarchical fighting force in official military uniform using conventional weapons is over.
Today’s rebel groups rely on guerrilla warfare and organized terror: a sniper firing from a rooftop; a homemade bomb delivered in a package, detonated in a truck, or concealed on the side of a road. Groups are more likely to try to assassinate opposition leaders, journalists, or police recruits than government soldiers. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, masterminded the use of suicide bombings to kill anyone cooperating with the Shia-controlled government during Iraq’s civil war. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, perfected the use of massive car bombs to attack the same government. Hamas’s main tactic against Israel has been to target average Israeli citizens going about their daily business.
Most Americans cannot imagine another civil war in their country. They assume our democracy is too resilient, too robust to devolve into conflict. Or they assume that our country is too wealthy and advanced to turn on itself. Or they assume that any rebellion would quickly be stamped out by our powerful government, giving the rebels no chance. They see the Whitmer kidnapping plot, or even the storming of the U.S. Capitol, as isolated incidents: the frustrated acts of a small group of violent extremists. But this is because they don’t know how civil wars start.
close modern America is to erupting into conflict, we must acquaint ourselves with the conditions that give rise to, and define, modern civil war. That is the purpose of this book. Civil wars ignite and escalate in ways that are predictable; they follow a script. The same patterns emerge whether you look at Bosnia, Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, Northern Ireland, or Israel. The pages that follow will explore these patterns: We’ll examine where civil wars tend to start, who tends to start them, and what tend to be the triggers.
We’ll also look at how to stop them. An eruption of conflict requires a set of variables to build on one another, like winds in a gathering storm. As I’ve become increasingly alarmed by the potential of a second civil war in America, I’ve grown personally invested in what we, as citizens, can learn from experts about defusing these gales and squalls. These incidents have offered us a lesson: We have trusted, for too long perhaps, that peace will always prevail. That our institutions are unshakable, that our nation is exceptional. We’ve learned that we cannot take our democracy for granted, that we must understand our power as citizens.
Some of the risks have felt immediate, such as the January 6 assault on the Capitol by far-right extremists who hoped to stop Joe Biden’s presidency, or the politicization of face masks in the middle of a global pandemic. But there are deeper forces at play, and we must also be willing to acknowledge them. In the past decade, our country has undergone a seismic change in economic and cultural power. Our demographics have shifted. Inequality has grown. Our institutions have been weakened, manipulated to serve the interests of some over others. America’s citizens are increasingly held captive by demagogues, on their screens or in their government. We are seeing similar developments in democracies all over the world.
And while we have been busy fighting battles over immigrant caravans and “cancel culture,” violent extremist groups, especially on the radical right, have grown stronger. Since 2008, over 70 percent of extremist-related deaths in the United States have been at the hands of people connected to far-right or white-supremacist movements. Their growth may have felt imperceptible; extremists typically organize slowly and clandestinely. It took three years for Mexico’s Zapatista to grow to twelve members, and over six years for a group of thirty Tamil teenagers to form the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka. Al-Qaeda leaders sheltered with tribes in the desert of Mali for years before they joined the rebellion there. But now, it seems, the evidence is everywhere. Americans are no longer surprised to see armed men at rallies and paramilitary groups converging at protests. It has become commonplace to see Confederate flags for sale in Pennsylvania convenience stores, or American flags with a thin blue line and insignias of all kinds. We are now beginning to understand that bumper stickers like the circle of stars around the Roman numeral III, the Valknot, and the Celtic Cross are not innocent. Instead, they are symbols of America’s far-right militant groups, which are becoming increasingly visible, vocal, and dangerous.
America is a special country, but when you study the hundreds of civil wars that have broken out since the end of World War II, as I have, you come to understand that we are not immune to conflict. Here, too, there is anger and resentment and the desire to dominate rivals. Here, too, we fight for political power to protect a way of life. Here, too, we buy guns when we feel threatened. So in those moments when I would prefer to look away or take comfort in the voice that says, No, that could never happen here, I think of all that political science has taught me. I think about the facts before us.
And I think about the time I met Berina Kovac and we shared stories about political violence, and how it tends to sneak up on people. Berina had grown up in Sarajevo. As militias began to organize in the hills and suburbs, as former colleagues increasingly targeted her with ethnic slurs, she continued to go to work, attend weddings, take weekend holidays, and try to convince herself that everything would be fine. But late one evening in March 1992, she was at home with her son, just a few weeks old, when the power went out. “And then suddenly,” Kovac told me, “you started to hear machine guns.”