By Erin Snodgrass Business Insider
An expert in political violence says extremists could be leading the US toward a modern-day civil war.
Barbara F. Walter, a political science professor at the University of California at San Diego, spoke to The Washington Post earlier this year about the perilous state of American democracy in a far-ranging interview that trended on social media this week.
Walter, the author of “How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them,” has spent years studying civil wars, investigating risk factors, the difficulties of resolution, and approaches to ending the conflicts.
Experts long believed each civil war was caused by its own unique set of factors, resistant to parallels or comparisons. But as methodology and technology improved, Walter told The Post that several patterns began to emerge, two of which proved to be highly predictive.
