‘Feral cities': Western countries face civil war within five years, military expert warns

News.com.au

2 days ago

Britain, France and other western countries are dangerously close to collapsing into violent civil conflict characterised by 'feral cities' where authorities can no longer maintain rule of law, a military expert has warned.
In a sobering essay in the latest issue of Military Strategy Magazine, David Betz, Professor of War in the Modern World in the Department of War Studies at King's College London, argues governments across the west have 'squandered their legitimacy'.
He warns they are 'losing the ability to peacefully manage multicultural societies' that are 'terminally fractured by ethnic identity politics' and increasingly gripped by riots, terrorism and unrest.
'The initial result is an accelerating descent of multiple major cities into marginally 'feral' status,' he wrote.
The concept of 'feral cities' was defined by US Navy commander Richard Norton, in a 2003 article for Naval War College Review, as 'a metropolis with a population of more than a million people in a state the government of which has lost the ability to maintain the rule of law within the city's boundaries yet remains a functioning actor in the greater international system'.
'As of 2024, a list of global cities exhibiting some or all the characteristics of amber and red ferality, such as high levels of political corruption, negotiated areas of police control if not outright no-go zones, decaying industries, crumbling infrastructure, unsustainable debt, two-tier policing, and the burgeoning of private security, would include many in the West,' Prof Betz said.
'The direction of the situation, moreover, is decisively towards greater ferality. In short, things are manifestly worsening right now. They are, however, going to get very much worse — I would estimate over not more than five years.'
He bases this belief on the combination of two other key factors.
One is the 'urban versus rural dimension of the coming conflicts which, in turn, is a result of migrant settlement dynamics'.
'Simply put, the major cities are radically more diverse and have a growing mutually hostile political relationship with the country in which they are embedded,' he said.
Prof Betz points to recent election results in France, the UK and US which highlighted the deepening split between left-wing voting urban centres and right-wing rural areas.
The second factor, is 'the way in which modern critical infrastructure — gas, electricity, and transportation — is configured'.
'Again, simply put, the life support systems of cities are all located in or pass through rural areas,' he said. 'None of this infrastructure is well guarded, indeed most of it is effectively impossible to guard adequately.'
Prof Betz predicts the likely trajectory of 'the coming civil wars' based on these factors.
'First, the major cities become ungovernable, i.e., feral, exhausting the ability of the police even with military assistance to maintain civil order, while the broader perception of systemic political legitimacy plummets beyond recovery. The economy is crippled by metastasising intercommunal violence and consequent internal displacement,' he said.
'Second, these feral cities come to be seen by many of those indigenes of the titular nationality now living outside them as effectively having been lost to foreign occupation. They then directly attack the exposed city support systems with a view to causing their collapse through systemic failure.'
Any civil war would be 'long and bloody' — using casualty figures from height of the Northern Ireland conflict as a guide, Prof Betz estimates more than 23,000 per year killed in the UK.
He urges politicians, defence leaders and the public to avoid falling victim to 'normalcy bias' and begin planning for the very real possibility of civil conflict, including by the identification of suitable 'secure zones' for displaced populations, and the protection of important cultural property.
'At the time of writing the countries that are most likely to experience the outbreak of violent civil conflict first are Britain and France,' he said.
'The conditions are similar, however, throughout Western Europe as well as, for slightly different reasons, the United States; moreover, it must be assumed that if civil war breaks out in one place it is likely to spread elsewhere.'
Prof Betz has previously outlined how 'the conditions which scholars consider to be indicative of incipient civil war are present widely in Western states' — namely 'a combination of culturally fractured societies, economic stagnation, elite overreach and a collapse of public confidence in the ability of normal politics to solve problems'.
These factors have long been applied to the analysis of countries outside the west, but he says politicians must accept the danger internally is now 'clear and present'.
'According to the best guess of the extant literature, in a country where the conditions are present the chances of actual civil war occurring is 4 per cent per year,' Prof Betz said.
'With this as an assumption, we may conclude that the chances of it occurring are 18.5 per cent over five years.'
Assuming there are at least 10 countries in Europe that face the prospect of violent civil conflict, 'the chances then of it occurring in any one of these countries over five years is 87 per cent'.
Prof Betz notes both France and the UK have experienced 'precursor incidents' targeting critical infrastructure.
In July 2024, co-ordinated arson attacks disabling Paris' rail network were followed by a major sabotage on the long-distance fibre-optic cable network.
In London, vigilantes known as 'Blade Runners' have damaged or destroyed more than 1000 surveillance cameras intended to enforce the city's ultra-low-emission-zone (ULEZ) scheme.
'The precariousness of contemporary urbanity is a thing which geographers have worried over for at least a half century,' Prof Betz said, noting the viability of large cities 'has always been contingent' on the supply of resources from the surrounding country.
'Their apparent stability is, in fact, an astonishing balancing act requiring constant and competent maintenance. On current trajectory, that balancing act is going to fail.'
It comes as France was again gripped by rioting over the weekend, with two people killed and nearly 200 injured as violent mobs took to the streets following Paris Saint-Germain's (PSG) Champions League victory.
One distressing clip on social media showed two young women in a car being surrounded by young men before the passenger window was smashed open.
Far-right politician Marine Le Pen said on Monday that the 'atrocities committed last night throughout France' were 'the result of 40 years of laxity and renunciation'.
'Today in France, it is no longer possible to have moments of popular fervour without thugs coming to smash and burn everything and deprive the French of the serenity to which they should be entitled,' she wrote on X.
A growing number of European leaders have sounded warnings about political unrest in increasingly fractured multicultural societies.
British Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer last month announced a surprise crackdown on immigration, warning the UK risked 'becoming an island of strangers'.
In 2023, Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said the country was being gripped by a wave of violent crime the likes of which it had 'never seen before'. 'Irresponsible immigration policy and failed integration have brought us to this point,' he said.
Mette Frederiksen, Denmark's centre-left Prime Minister, said in March that 'I consider this mass migration into Europe as a threat to the daily life in Europe'.
'If I ask people about security and their security concerns, many of them will reply that Russia and defending Europe is top of mind right now,' she told Politico.