Conclusion:
‘Normalcy bias’ is a concept originating in disaster management that refers to the way in which people sometimes fail to react in a timely manner to warnings of imminent danger. The defence establishments of the West ought to guard against a tendency to disbelieve or to minimise the threat of internal conflict. The matter is that conditions which are generally agreed to be indicative of the potential for civil war are vividly present across a range of states which have for a long time been thought beyond such sort of conflict.
Strategic studies may be quite caught off guard, moreover, for two other reasons. First, civil wars are little studied in the same manner as interstate wars. The literature on civil wars is extensive, including important works on its causation, resolution, social origins, outcomes, post-war rebuilding and so on; but it is rarely studied, as is ‘normal war’, from the perspective of military strategy—in other words, how it is or should be fought. The work of Stathis Kalyvas, the most astute contemporary observer of the ‘logic’ of civil wars, is a rare exception.[xxxii]
However, second, even Kalyvas just over a decade ago concluded that in the long view, civil wars were in decline. His further point, though, was that civil war had undergone three major transformations over the last 200 years to, in the last instance, a form which he struggled to describe—one far less ordered and conventional.[xxxiii] That form is becoming evident. To suggest that civil war is imminent and ascendant and precisely in parts of the world thought, heretofore, to be the wealthiest and least restive—is contrary to expectation—but that is where we are.
