How Civil Wars Start

The political scientist's data-driven warning. Drawing on decades of comparative research and her service on a government task force that predicted instability abroad, Walter lays out the conditions that tip a country toward internal conflict, and asks, with the detachment of someone who has measured the same patterns elsewhere, how the United States scores. The book is unsettling precisely because it is methodical. A warning delivered not as alarm but as findings.

A political scientist who studies civil wars across the world and the conditions that precede them. How Civil Wars Start draws on decades of comparative data, and her service on a government task force predicting political instability, to identify the warning signs that tip a country toward internal conflict. She writes the data-driven warning, with the detachment of someone who has measured the same patterns elsewhere.