What Elon Musk perhaps gets wrong about civil wars being 'inevitable'

It is in the nature of civil wars that they are not often predictable

On the site that is still known as Twitter, Elon Musk has again tweeted that ‘civil war is inevitable’.

The thing is that civil wars are rarely inevitable - at least not in the short- to medium-term.

This is because civil wars occur, almost by definition, where there is some kind of pre-existing polity which has broken down.

This is what makes them ‘civil wars’ as opposed to any other form of human conflict.

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A polity often has two key features.

The first feature is a means of regulating disputes - political, legal, social, religious disputes, and so on.

The second feature is a means of enforcing order - usually a form of legitimised coercive power.

It is only when a polity fails to resolve a dispute and then does not enforce order that there risks being a civil war.

The presence of perceived contradictions within a given society is not sufficient: a ruler or ruling class can be quite adept at keeping power despite significant domestic discontent.

Some polities - from tyrannies to loose confederations - can exist when with stark differences between those who are governed.

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In the longer term, there may be a case for a ‘civil war’ being inevitable.

Most political systems will break down eventually, after a century or two.

In what is now Great Britain and Ireland there have been various civil conflicts on and off for hundreds of years.

If Musk waits long enough then there may again be a civil war one day.

But one suspects that is not what he means.

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What is often meant by those who say civil conflict is inevitable is that they normatively think that civil conflict should be inevitable.

That they believe there should be a civil conflict on socio-economic or ethnic or religious or some other lines within a given polity.

But, to adapt Karl Marx, ‘the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of those in power often staying in power to the frustration of those who want to have a revolution’.

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Civil wars are rarely inevitable.

And civil wars deliberately brought about and signalled in advance are rarer still.

If the polity fails to resolve the underlying disputes in a given society - including by the means of effecting fundamental constitutional or socio-economic changes or by granting autonomy or independence to a certain part of the polity - then there is the additional hurdle of the state being normally in a strong starting position to enforce and maintain order.

To say that one thinks normatively there should be a civil war is not the same as saying positively that there will be one.

Yes, every polity is capable of collapsing, and a civil war is thereby always a possibility.

But they are often not predictable when they do happen.

And they then only seem inevitable in hindsight.