Barbara F. Walter

Walter is a political scientist who spent years on a task force set up for the American intelligence community to predict which countries would collapse into civil war, and the model it built turned out to rest on two things: a state in the unstable middle between autocracy and democracy, and parties organised around identity rather than policy. How Civil Wars Start applies those measures to the United States and concludes it entered the danger band in the twenty-tens. Other scholars have pushed back on how comparable a rich old democracy is to the cases in the data set. She teaches in California and has worked on Northern Ireland, Syria and Iraq.