Hello and welcome to the 538 Politics Podcast, I'm Galen Drug.

In the wake of the January 6th attack on the Capitol, academics and journalists have increasingly

considered the possibility of future political violence in America.

And polls suggest it's something Americans are worried about.

62% of respondents in a recent U-mass poll said they're at least somewhat concerned

about violence in the 2024 presidential election.

Our guest today has gone a step further.

Barbara F. Walter is a political scientist at UC San Diego who has spent her career studying

foreign civil wars.

In her new book, How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them, she writes, quote,

we are now closer to a civil war than any of us would like to believe.

Barbara F. Walter, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

You worked on the political instability task force, which is a project sponsored by the US

government that studies domestic conflicts abroad.

And as part of that task force, academics and data analysts created a predictive model,

something that we're very familiar with here at 538, for when these kinds of conflicts will occur.

What are you looking at to predict something as complex as a civil war breaking out?

So the task force brings in people like me to help them brainstorm about factors that might matter.

So I've been setting civil wars around the world for the last 30 years.

I've read all of the qualitative studies, all the quantitative studies.

And so they bring people like me and they say, well, what do you think could matter?

...