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document updated 3 months ago, on Dec 23, 2023

Political science of civil war in the U.S.

Precipitating factors

democracy ⇔ anocracy ⇔ autocracy spectrum

Anocracy, also known as hybrid democracy, is a form of government that's part democracy and part autocracy (an autocracy is similar to a dictatorship).

Anocracies are much more likely to lead to violence, however there isn't yet scholarly consensus about whether anoncacy is more likely to lead to civil war.

Other theories of what can precede a civil war — greed, grievance, and opportunities.

Measures of democracy

Have mentions of the term "civil war" actually increased lately?

(TODO — Maybe use the NOW Corpus ("News on the Web") (or maybe the "Unified Representation of Twitter and Online News" data is available?) to graph the frequency of use of "civil war" since 2008)