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

Abstract

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 seventeenth-century 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.1 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.Once it arrives at the actual fighting, the book explores how and why people decide to wield such brutality against others whom they might know intimately. Fowler’s model accounts for the tit-for-tat nature of violence and how it becomes justifiable to a range of participants, including those initially seeking to avoid it altogether. By examining evolving group dynamics and individual agency—everything from emotional grievance to economic gain—Fowler identifies multiple paths that generate a cold logic for waging total war against dehumanized opponents. The implications of this process are beyond sobering, and the third element of Fowler’s framework offers little solace. Although the fighting theoretically could end via exhaustion or negotiated resolution, he finds that, in most cases, the cycle of violence usually concludes where it began—at the business end of a rifle.Aside from the model building that sits at the center of the book, The Grammar of Civil War has much to offer scholars examining military conflict, civil war, and modern Latin America. Fowler draws deeply from primary sources to illustrate how violent conflict has unfolded in the past. The book’s second chapter provides a narrative of Mexico’s War of Reform as a stand-alone episode, with renewed emphasis on the critical roles played by the 1857 Plan de Tacubaya and the subsequent massacre of civilians at the same site in 1859. The war remains firmly in view, even as Fowler deploys that conflict in the service of his theoretical model in the chapters to follow. Although such an exercise potentially could dilute the history or the analytical framework, Fowler’s linguistic dexterity, respect for contingency, and clarity of vision hold the endeavor together.Along the way, Fowler compellingly examines why scholars and the reading public tend to overlook the War of Reform, especially in comparison with the U.S. Civil War. Fowler makes a convincing case for why the War of Reform deserves more consideration as a historical turning point. The book also effectively incorporates the perspectives of civil-war participants from a broad social and geographical swath of life. The ideological and religious imperatives guiding politicians, military leaders, and high clergy in Mexico City may dominate the proceedings, but Fowler does not neglect the imperatives of peripheral indigenous communities and regional bosses. Those seeking a better understanding of nineteenth-century Mexico or the cruel prerogatives of civil war elsewhere in the modern world will be well served by reading this book.