Barbara F. Walter Quotes

People are desperate for high quality analysis, especially of complex current events.

Scholars know where civil wars 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.

The internet has created incentives for warring factions to frame their struggle in global terms in order to attract the widest audience of supporters. This creates greater opportunities for outside states to become involved in the war to try to influence the outcome.