Benjamin Cohen begins his new book — his 20th, if you are counting — with a fictional news dispatch from the year 2035.

“After years of festering discontent with the direction of politics in Washington, California today formally declared its independence as a sovereign nation,” it reads. “President Vance has threatened a military takeover of state government in Sacramento, backed by National Guard troops from nearby red states. Armed conflict looks increasingly possible.”

A provocative scenario, all the more plausible coming at a time when California’s governor is furious at the president for ordering troops into the state to keep order at immigration protests. But for all our partisan acrimony and political polarization, America isn’t really headed towards a second Civil War — right?

“I wish I could be that sanguine about it,” said Distinguished Professor Emeritus Cohen, who spent 30 years as the Louis G. Lancaster Professor of International Political Economy in the Political Science Department at UC Santa Barbara before retiring from teaching in 2021. “I’m not. It seems to me we cannot ignore the risks of the current fissures and fragmentation — the breakdown of a sense of community.”

Given that today’s political divide is more between urban and rural as opposed to North vs. South or East vs. West, “It’s difficult for me to imagine how things would divide up if there were a civil war,” Cohen added. “But the probability of such a war is substantially greater than zero.”

Cohen’s views on the subject are extremely well-informed. His new book “Dream States: A Lurking Nightmare for the World Order” (Oxford University Press, 2025) is a comprehensive guide to secession movements currently active all around the world. He provides an assessment of the risk of these efforts leading to violence, and offers a possible path to diffusing tensions.

“I consider secession a grievously underappreciated phenomenon,” he said. “My motivation to write this book was to call people’s attention to this fact.

“We tend to simplify geography by looking exclusively at the existing lines on a map that separate one sovereign state from another,” he continued. “But the reality is there are many people within those states that are very unhappy with the arrangement. They’d prefer to draw the lines in a different way. In some cases, they’re prepared to fight to redraw those lines.”

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