The Grammar of Civil War: A Mexican Case Study, 1857–61 by Will Fowler

This book grows out of Fowler’s previous studies of the forceful negotiations that dominated the early political life of nineteenth-century Mexico. Known as pronunciamientos, these tense affairs usually ended without cataclysmic violence and led to concessions and agreement between the contending factions. In short, Fowler has already demonstrated how democracy by other means functioned in Mexico. Such was not the case with the War of Reform from 1857 to 1861, in which the fighting claimed approximately 200,000 lives. The Grammar of Civil War explores how and why this exceptional violence came to pass. But Fowler has more than the history of Mexico on his mind this time around. After all, his previous monograph, La Guerra de Tres Años, 1857–1861 (Mexico City, 2020) delves fully into that conflict as a singular military episode. The titular “grammar” of his present study amounts to an analytical framework that Fowler proposes for the study of any modern civil conflict around the world. He maintains that the deployment of this model can explicate even such far-flung events as the seventeenthcentury English Civil War and the twenty-first-century Syrian civil war. Fowler begins by drawing from the contributions of political scientists like Kalyvas, Sambanis, and Conteh-Morgan to develop his definition of civil war. Crudely summarized, civil wars are conflicts located within the bounds of a nation-state that features a single government prior to the commencement of hostilities. They also involve at least two warring parties—one of which enjoys government sponsorship. Finally, civil wars require competing political factions that lay claim to national authority, sustained military operations, and a significant death toll of military and civilian lives on each side (7). Fowler closes his introduction by elucidating a tripartite framework for understanding how civil wars begin, the internal dynamics that compel people to continue fighting once war has begun, and the ways in which civil wars end. Each of these components receives consistent and clear explanation in a chapter of its own. To understand how civil wars begin, Fowler examines the macro-transnational sphere alongside the national-regional context, which encompasses structural contributing factors, social divides, ideological disputes, and cultural concerns. Amid these swirling forces, an activation period that is difficult to predict and even more challenging to defuse commences. He identifies eight unique but linked components that must become manifest before the preceding stress factors culminate in a civil war.