An expert on civil wars discusses where political extremists are taking this country
Barbara F. Walter, 57, is a political science professor at the University of California at San Diego and the author of "How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them," which was released in January. She lives in San Diego with her husband.
Q: Having studied civil wars all over the world, and the conditions that give rise to them, you argue in your book, somewhat chillingly, that the United States is coming dangerously close to those conditions. Can you explain that?
A: So we actually know a lot about civil wars - how they start, how long they last, why they're so hard to resolve, how you end them. And we know a lot because since 1946, there have been over 200 major armed conflicts. And for the last 30 years, people have been collecting a lot of data, analyzing the data, looking at patterns. I've been one of those people.
We went from thinking, even as late as the 1980s, that every one of these was unique. And the way people studied it is they would be a Somalia expert, a Yugoslavia expert, a Tajikistan expert. And everybody thought their case was unique and that you could draw no parallels. Then methods and computers got better, and people like me came and could collect data and analyze it. And what we saw is that there are lots of patterns at the macro level.
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