EXTREMISMWe Don’t Need a Civil War to Be in Serious Trouble

By Christina Pazzanese

Published 13 January 2022

With extremist movements and rhetoric on the rise, a growing number of people, including some historians and many opinion writers, believe the U.S. is on the brink of disaster. “There are so many bad things that can happen well short of civil war that I wish we, as a country, were talking more about,” says Harvard University’s Jay Ulfelder, a political scientist who studies civil wars.

As the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol prepares for televised hearings later this month, public attitudes toward the attack are divided sharply along partisan lines.

With extremist movements and rhetoric on the rise, a growing number of people, including some historians and many opinion writers, believe the U.S. is on the brink of disaster. A Zogby poll in the fall found that 46 percent of Americans think the country is headed for another civil war. In late December, a survey by The Washington Post and the University of Maryland revealed that one in three Americans think that violence against the government is sometimes justified. But are we really on the brink of armed conflict or is it just that the political vitriol makes it feel that way?

Jay Ulfelder is a political scientist who studies civil wars and former research director of the Political Instability Task Force, a U.S. government-funded program that helps policymakers understand and anticipate political crises around the globe. Currently a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, he spoke with the Harvard Gazette’s Christina Pazzanese about the prospect of civil war in the U.S. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Christina Pazzanese: First, how is civil war defined today? Second, is the country heading down this road?
Jay Ulfelder
:I’m glad you asked the definitional question. When anybody asks “Is it going to happen?” my first response is, “What do you mean by civil war?” The answer depends tremendously on that.

In academic work, civil war is generally defined as a violent conflict between two organized, armed groups within a country that kills at least 1,000 people. Sometimes it’s a certain number of people per year — usually, in the hundreds — and where those people are killed directly by violent clashes between those armed organized factions. So it matters that we’re not talking about armed troops or police massacring unarmed civilians.