Recent quotes:

Empathy for the Pain of the Conflicting Group Is Altered Across Generations in the Aftermath of a Genocide - Neuroscience News

“But what was even more critical is that children from both former genocide perpetrators and survivors displayed the same intergroup bias as their parents, even though they did not experience the conflict themselves. This result might explain why some conflicts sometimes last over generations, as the children appear to have the same biases as their parents”, she adds.

James Meek · What are you willing to do? On the case for civil war · LRB 26 May 2022

Systemic Peace hasn’t publicly updated its ratings for most countries since 2018, but for reference, the eight countries rated 5 that year were Ecuador, Haiti, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Papua New Guinea, Somalia and Suriname. The ways Systemic Peace’s data diverge from what a lay person would expect of a democracy-autocracy scale are interesting. The US is rated as a sound democracy from 1829 until just before the Civil War, despite its embrace of slavery in that period. Belgium scores a solid 6 for much of its brutal rule over Congo. The UK gets a perfect 10 rating from 1922, despite being, at that time, at the head of a racially organised, exploitative empire that denied democratic rights to millions. Walter claims that a polity score is the best predictor of a country’s instability, but Systemic Peace gives Britain a 10 throughout the period of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which Walter uses elsewhere as an example of an actual civil war.