Leading political scientist Barbara F. Walter will discuss her new book How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them with Professor Erica Chenoweth. In this book, Walter examines the dramatic rise in violent extremism around the globe (Iraq, Ukraine, Ethiopia, Philippines, India, Syria) and sounds the alarm on the increasing likelihood of a second civil war in the United States.

Political violence rips apart several towns in southwest Texas. A far-right militia plots to kidnap the governor of Michigan and try her for treason. An armed mob of Trump supporters and conspiracy theorists storms the U.S. Capitol. Are these isolated incidents? Or is this the start of something bigger? Barbara F. Walter has spent her career studying civil conflict in places like Iraq and Sri Lanka, but now she has become increasingly worried about our own country.

Barbara F. Walter, Ph.D., is the Rohr Professor of International Affairs at the School of Global Policy & Strategy at the University of California, San Diego. She received her Ph.D from the University of Chicago and completed post docs at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University and the War and Peace Institute at Columbia University. Walter is one of the world's leading experts on civil wars, political violence, and terrorism. Her books include the award-winning Committing to Peace: Why Negotiations Fail, Reputation and Civil War, and Civil Wars, Insecurity, and Intervention. Her recent book, How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them, explores whether the U.S. is heading toward a second civil war.

Erica Chenoweth, Ph.D. is the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Kennedy School and a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Chenoweth directs the Nonviolent Action Lab at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, where they study political violence and its alternatives. Foreign Policy magazine ranked Chenoweth among the Top 100 Global Thinkers in 2013 for their efforts to promote the empirical study of nonviolent resistance.

This program is sponsored by the Cambridge Public Library Foundation and dedicated to the memory of the Chair emeritus of the Library’s Board of Trustees, Janet Axelrod.