‘We’re Already Past The Tipping Point’: Academic Sounds ‘Civil War’ Warning For High-Migration Western Nations

A London academic has appealed to policymakers and military leaders to consider taking remedial action to minimise the impact of civil wars, which he warns have become a distinct possibility in Western nations.

Professor of War in the Modern World, David Betz of King’s College London, has claimed that many European countries now exhibit signs of being in a pre-civil war state. According to his research, there is a statistically significant chance of a war breaking out in the next five years in a Western state, and given Europe’s interconnected nature, it could spark similar conflicts in neighbouring nations.

Previously a relatively obscure figure, Betz has steadily picked up attention through 2025 for his warnings about the potential danger from the Balkanisation of British and other European nations. This week, he went further yet and said in conversation with documentary maker and former BBC presenter Andrew Gold that it now appears to be too late to actually prevent things getting “very much worse”, and urged decision-makers to act to at least cushion the blow.

In a chilling warning, the academic said, “I would probably avoid big cities. I would suggest you reduce your exposure to big cities if you are able.”

The coming violence, he believes, has been made inevitable by decades of government ineptitude and can’t be totally avoided. Betz asserted that only a strategy of minimisation remains. He said:

… there isn’t anything they can do, it’s baked in. We’re already past the tipping point, is my estimation… we are past the point at which there is a political offramp. We are past the point at which normal politics is able to solve the problem… almost every plausible way forward from here involves some kind of violence in my view.

Anything the government tries to do at this point… you can solve one kind of problem, but it will aggravate another kind of problem in doing so, and you get back to violence. The question really is about mitigating the costs, to my mind, not about preventing the outcome, I’m sorry to say… I have not heard a credible political way forward and I don’t see a single political figure who is credible in the role of national saviour, or even inclined to do so.

… “the bottom line is I don’t think there is now a political solution to this which takes the form of everything just working out OK after some period of difficulty. Things are bad now, but they are going to get very much worse. Hopefully after they will get better, but you will have to go through the period of very much worse before you get there.

While Betz was reluctant to be drawn on exactly what might happen, he pointed to how deadly other civil wars have been. Citing what the United Kingdom euphemistically calls the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, Betz pointed out that in the worst year of that conflict, 500 people died in a Northern Ireland of just a few million people. Mapping that onto the 70 million who live in the United Kingdom today, that could mean 23,000 people die in a similar conflict.

Northern Ireland was less bloody than many civil wars, though, he said, noting conflicts like the Bosnian or Syrian wars killed between one and four per cent of the whole pre-war population, putting the death toll in the millions.

“I understand what I say is extremely unpleasant”, Betz said, remarking: “I just want to say dear elites, the consequences of your actions have arrived”.

While Betz says he is only making these warnings public because he wants to minimise future conflict and damage, he has been attacked for speaking out. Beyond claims that he is simply being alarmist, there are allegations that his work is actually intended to foment civil war through the power of suggestion. Betz denies these assertions.

The basis of Betz’s ideas is not novel, but as he states, they are built on a wide body of literature and academic research on the causes and impacts of civil war around the world. From this literature, he says, he has determined that Western nations like the United Kingdom, France, or Sweden already exhibit the precursors to conflict, among them “dire social instability”, “economic decline”, and “elite pusillanimity”.

He has previously said extremely heterogenous and homogenous societies are not conspicuously prone to civil war because, at least in the first case, there are so many small, splintered ethnic or identity groups that no one of them is strong enough to plunge the nation into war, and all can be “divided and conquered” by the government. In the latter, presumably, the homogeneity engenders a high-trust environment where conflict is unnecessary.

“The most unstable are moderately homogenous societies”, he has written, not least because a handful of distinct groups have the will and means to compete, but also, in the particular situation in Western nations, because legacy majority groups perceive their status being taken away and would fight to remain dominant.

Perhaps for this reason, Betz said this week that while he notes recent reports warning that, on present demographic trends, the United Kingdom will become a minority white-British country in just a few decades, he suspects this will never actually happen because at some point, Britons may move to reverse their own fortunes.

“You could make such an argument, but that’s, I think, making a lot of assumptions about people’s likely response to things. I don’t think that society is so inert”, he said, continuing: “I just don’t think the British people want to be displaced from their own country… I think people are going to reject that. And they are already, people are already perceiving an urgency to act to prevent the loss of something they feel very strongly about still.”

Stating he was departing the cold, rational approach of his academic work to the causes of civil wars and the implications for several Western states, the professor said of his “gut feeling” that “the existence of this idea [of England]… is very seriously in peril… how [people] react against that is the question. There’s a grave potential for them to react in ways that take us right off the scale. I hope that doesn’t occur, but we are at a very perilous moment.”

Among the urgent actions that ought to be taken by either the governments or military leadership structures of “heretofore highly functioning and highly advanced and very well armed” at-threat nations, Betz suggested, were steps to ensure the safe custody of nuclear weapons and cultural heritage. Citing the experience of the former Soviet Union, which all but descended into Civil War in the 1990s but the safety of whose nuclear weapons was the subject of intense international attention, Betz said “back-up plans” should be “quietly” drawn up to ensure nations like the UK or France don’t have their nuclear arsenals threatened by interior power-struggles.

On items of cultural heritage, Betz stated that their destruction is not merely a by-product of civil wars but often a key means of attack by dissidents against the legacy dominant group. Earlier this year, Betz wrote:

Smashing symbols of the collective countenance of one’s enemy is the central element of civil war strategic messaging. There is, simply put, no surer way to demonstrate the demise of one social order and its replacement with another. That is why from ancient times, such as when the Hebrews obliterated Canaanite shrines, to modern times such as when the Afghan Taliban exploded the Bamiyan Buddhas, iconoclasm and civil war have been partners.

Portable art such as paintings, statuary, manuscripts, and other artifacts are also significantly endangered in civil war because they may easily be turned into money. Whether it is intended to enrich opportunistic warlords or to generate funds to purchase arms, the fact of the matter is that widespread looting and opportunistic vandalism is endemic in such conflicts.

This week, he added: “Britain is a particularly culturally rich country, there is a lot of treasure, and most of it is just lying around”. He advocated planning to protect cultural heritage early, as this would both mitigate “the severity of the coming civil war, while maximising the potential of post-war reconstruction,” citing the actions of the United Kingdom in the Second World War when huge volumes of art were removed to remote, disused mines, to protect them from German bombing.