David Betz

David J. Betz is a Canadian professor and researcher in the field of war studies. Betz is professor of war in the modern world at the Department of War Studies, King's College London, having joined the department in 2002. He is also a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Quotes "Civil War Comes to the West" (2023) "Civil War Comes to the West", Military Strategy Magazine, vol. 9, no. 1 (Summer 2023), pp. 20-26 A generation ago all Western countries could still be described as to a large degree cohesive nations, each with a greater or lesser sense of common identity and heritage. By contrast, all now are incohesive political entities, jigsaw puzzles of competing identity-based tribes, living in large part in virtually segregated 'communities' competing over diminishing societal resources increasingly obviously and violently. The intimacy of civil war, its political intensity, and its fundamentally social quality, plus the acute accessibility to attack on all sides of everyone’s weak points can make them particularly savage and miasmic. ... It is a form of war in which people suffer raw cruelty and fanaticism not for what they have done but for what they are. Over the last thirty years the West has preoccupied itself thanklessly in an expeditionary capacity in the invertebrate civil wars of others. It ought to have learned that it is impossible to maintain an integrated multi-valent society once neighbours start kidnapping each other’s children and murdering them with hand drills, blowing up each other's cultural events, slaying each other's teachers and religious leaders, and tearing down their icons. It is soberingly worth noting, moreover, that plenty of instances of all those things have occurred already in the West and all of them have occurred in France alone in the last five years. Identity politics may be defined as politics in which people having a particular racial, religious, ethnic, social, or cultural identity tend to promote their own specific interests or concerns without regard to the interests or concerns of any larger political group. It is overtly post-national. Thus far what has been practiced is a sort of 'asymmetric multiculturalism' in which in-group preference, ethnic pride, and group solidarity—notably in voting—are acceptable for all groups except Whites for whom such things are considered to represent supremacist attitudes that are anathematic to social order. There is a distinctively observable urban-rural dimension to immigrant settlement patterns: basically, the cities are radically more heterogenous than the countryside. Thus, logically, we may conclude that civil wars in the West that burn across ethnic cleavages will have a distinctively rural vs. urban character. The most critical vulnerability of infrastructure is to domestic attack, against which it is unguarded (and likely un-guardable). Normally functioning societies have no need of such defences, which is to say that a lot of comfortable assumptions ride on those two words. "Civil War Comes to the West, Part II" (2025) "Civil War Comes to the West, Part II: Strategic Realities", Military Strategy Magazine, vol. 10, no. 2 (Spring 2025), pp. 6-16 All civil wars are sui generis but we can surmise some general qualities that they tend to possess, which serve well to structure the following rumination on how to navigate the coming turmoil. These are as follows:1. Civil wars inflict serious depredation through iconoclastic vandalism or theft of societal cultural infrastructure—i.e., art and other historic objects and architecture.2. They destroy a country’s human capital through the strategic displacement of the civilian population on a mass scale.3. They increase societal vulnerability to predatory foreign intervention. External links Category:Living people Category:Academics from Canada Category:University College London faculty