This essay is about the growing threat of civil war in Western societies. It is written as both a warning and a reckoning: an explicit attempt to confront, without denial or sensationalism, the mounting pressures that are pushing advanced democracies toward rupture. As befits this magazine, these pressures are examined through the framework of strategic analysis: to assess dispassionately how they should be understood within the logic of ends pursued by violent means, and how that logic is likely to manifest in the future.
These forces have, for decades, been building in plain sight. They have been documented in fragments by scholars and debated on the fringes, yet too often ignored in mainstream commentary or else distorted by hyperbole in parts of the independent media. That long build-up was amplified by the assassination of the influential conservative commentator Charlie Kirk in the United States on 10 September 2025, who was killed while participating in lawful political discourse. His murder has been widely perceived as a stark signifier of America’s deep political divisions and a harbinger of further political violence.[1] Although this article was drafted before these events and is not a response to them, they have lent its arguments a sharper urgency and resonance.
The idea of civil war in the West, once dismissed as alarmist or confined to dystopian fiction, has gained prominence over the past year. What was once whispered on the margins is now increasingly discussed. Since 2023, Military Strategy Magazine has treated the subject with candour and seriousness, placing it ahead of almost all academic forums.[2] This article builds on that momentum, extending the angle of vision to situate these discussions within a longer trajectory, to gather evidence too often left scattered or overlooked, and to draw out the strategic implications that emerge when history and present trends are considered together.
The argument begins with the collapse of legitimacy that once allowed governments to function without coercion. It then turns to the new ‘peasant wars’ of revolt and ethnic fracture, before examining the silence of academia and the failures of elites to heed obvious warning signs. Along the way, it maps the expectation gap between rulers and ruled, the rise of leaderless movements, insurgent narratives, the fragility of global cities and the rural–urban divide, and the corrosive triad of digital networks, unconstrained immigration and declining social capital. The argument concludes that with the systematic undermining of the social compact, Western societies are not experiencing passing turbulence but entering the long twilight of civil war.
What follows is not prediction, but the anatomy of a crisis already in motion. The article will therefore seek to consider how far these dynamics can still be confronted, what structural trends are beyond reversal, and whether any signposts remain to avert the worst. The harsh truth, however, is that the hourglass has nearly emptied, and no society that squanders legitimacy has ever been granted more sand.
Legitimacy Lost: The States that Beat Themselves to Death
The genealogy of the argument that Western societies are sliding toward civil war is inevitably complex, but it does not rest on sudden revelation. For clarity, it is best seen in the convergence of two dynamics: the externalisation of insurgency through global networks, and the internal corrosion of legitimacy within Western societies.
The early 21st century’s so-called ‘small wars’—Iraq, Afghanistan, and other theatres of the ‘War on Terror’—were initially conceived as distant campaigns. Yet the insurgencies they spawned were never geographically containable. Globalised communications and diasporic flows ensured that these conflicts reverberated into Western homelands.[3] Techniques of insurgency, once analysed as phenomena of remote, arid battlefields, adapted to new digital ‘information ecologies’, where ideas and grievances travelled seamlessly across borders.[4] Once comfortably focused externally, the political and social impacts of these expeditionary campaigns inevitably spilled back into the domestic realm.[5]
These developments coincided with, and were exacerbated by, the corrosion of legitimacy from within. The United Kingdom offers a telling example. The 2016 referendum on EU membership exposed the fragility of democratic authority. For decades, the British establishment had deflected mounting popular discontent over integration into the European project.[6] When at last it permitted a referendum, the result was a close but unambiguous decision to leave. What followed, however, was less the execution of a democratic mandate than a prolonged demonstration of elite obstruction.[7] Parliament, the civil service, the courts, and much of the media conspired—openly and without embarrassment—to resist, delay and dilute the outcome.[8]
Nor was Britain unique. The European Union itself has displayed a habitual disdain for unfavourable verdicts from the ballot box, responding to inconvenient results in Denmark, Ireland, or France by rerunning referendums until the ‘correct’ answer was secured.[9] Taken together, these episodes illustrate how ruling elites, when confronted with electorates that refuse to ratify their designs, simply set aside the principle of popular sovereignty.[10] The decay of legitimacy, in short, is not an accident of mismanagement but a built-in feature of a governing order that no longer trusts—let alone believes in—its own people.
If legitimacy is the essential ‘magic’ of government—the unseen alchemy that renders obedience natural and governance low-cost—the post-referendum years were an act of self-strangulation.[11] Legitimacy was not merely undermined but hoisted into the public square and beaten to death for all to see. Governments can survive policy failures; they rarely survive the public perception that democratic choice is irrelevant.[12] The consequence is a political culture no longer defined by Left and Right, but by something starker: a belief that politics itself is theatre, with real decisions scripted elsewhere, beyond scrutiny or correction.[13] In this sense, the central political belief of liberal democracy—the conviction that voting matters—has withered away.
It was against this backdrop that the prospects for violent social fragmentation began to be assessed. Comparative European experiences provided the most immediate reference points: Northern Ireland’s Troubles and Italy’s ‘Years of Lead’, when political contestation was expressed through bombings, assassinations, and kidnappings.[14] Within this framework, the hypothesis was raised of a possible descent into a condition approximating to what has been described as ‘dirty war’[15]—a category derived from the Latin American cases of the 1970s and 1980s, where low-intensity insurgencies hardened into protracted cycles of terrorism, counter-terrorism and repression.[16]
Such comparisons are not deployed lightly. They point to the kind of chronic instability that arises once legitimacy has collapsed and violence seeps into the political bloodstream. The Brexit saga, in which elite resistance to a democratic mandate collided with decades of policies that sought to dissolve a sense of national commonality—chief among them multiculturalism and European integration—represents not a transient quarrel but the makings of precisely this condition.[17]
Wars We Choose, Wars That Choose Us
In discussing the likely course of these forces, the distinction between contingent and organic wars is crucial. Contingent wars arise from choices: miscalculations, misjudgements, or diplomatic failures that might have been avoided. The Gulf War of 1990–91, for instance, might not have occurred had Saddam Hussein been persuaded that annexing Kuwait would trigger overwhelming retaliation. Organic wars, by contrast, occur because structural instability makes conflict inevitable. Europe on the eve of 1914 is the archetype: a powder keg of alliances, mobilisations and demographic pressures waiting only for a spark.[18] The Western present increasingly resembles the latter: an ‘organic’ crisis of legitimacy, identity and political authority in which violence is not so much a possibility as a foreordained outcome.[19]
Warnings of this path are not new, particularly in what may be termed dissident literature. For example, the 2011 monograph Our Muslim Troubles by the pseudonymous author ‘El Inglés’, offered an account of demographic and cultural fault-lines that have since proved disturbingly accurate.[20] Yet such works are invariably dismissed as tainted by association with the ‘far-Right’, and ignored by academia, rather than treated as they should be in scholarly terms as gateways into the thought-worlds of political communities that, if polling and electoral evidence is anything to go by, increasingly represents a plurality of opinion across Western societies.[21]
The effect is not merely neglect but distortion: by quarantining uncomfortable perspectives, academic debate blinds itself to the very forces reshaping political life. Out of this reluctance has grown a class of ‘radicalisation experts’ who, though voluminous in number, understand less about the roots of civil disintegration than the ordinary citizen who senses instinctively that something is badly wrong.[22] The paradox is that what polite society brands as ‘extreme’ is increasingly felt in popular sentiments to be obvious.[23] When middle-aged, middle-class mothers—the most conservative demographic imaginable—report a ‘gut feeling’ that their society is sliding towards civil war, it is not extremism speaking but the intuition of the centre ground.[24]
The strategic lesson is inescapable: once legitimacy has been frittered away, no democratic system can repair itself through routine politics. A political order may muddle through for a time, but its long-term trajectory is organic—towards rupture.[25] To treat such volatility as fleeting unrest is to misread the forces shaping the age: it is to see only scattered embers where the fire has already taken hold.[26]
The New Peasant Wars: The Geography of Disorder
If legitimacy’s collapse explains the structural precondition, the dynamics of conflict are already taking shape in ways that recall yet depart from older patterns of revolt. Civil war in the Western context can be defined in its broadest sense as a violent conflict between parties under a shared sovereign authority at the point of its breakdown. Unlike classical civil wars of compatriots turned against one another, the 21st-century variant is likely to be characterised by insurgency, demographic sundering and elite-popular estrangement.[27] Its contours are not speculative; they are already visible.
The first vector resembles a modern ‘peasant revolt’—a mass uprising against political elites who are perceived to have violated the ‘social contract’.[28] Historically, such uprisings erupt when those in power alter the rules of the political game to the detriment of the governed. In contemporary Western societies, this cleavage is marked above all by the divide between nationalism and post-nationalism.[29]
David Goodhart’s taxonomy of the ‘Somewheres’ and the ‘Anywheres’ captures the schism with forensic clarity. The Somewheres—rooted in place, community and national identity—are the mass of the population who insist that they ‘want their countries back’.[30] The ‘Anywheres’—mobile, globalised and educated—dismiss such attachments as parochial.[31] A former senior British civil servant, Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell, expressed to Goodhart the creed openly when he declared that his role was to ‘maximise global, not national, welfare’.[32]
The second vector is inter-ethnic and inter-tribal, driven by demographic change and the accompanying perception of cultural dispossession.[33] Here the primary tension lies between native citizens, who sense political and economic decline as their demographic share falls, and migrant populations, whose enclaves grow in size, cohesion and confidence.
Patterns of poor integration vary, but certain communities have proved especially resistant to assimilation into Western societies. Relative size, internal solidarity and cultural distance all play a role, making incorporation over generations less likely rather than more.[34] Surveys suggest, disquietingly, that second and third generations in some groups often express greater alienation than their parents or grandparents. Muslim communities illustrate the problem most visibly: their demographic weight and cohesion have rendered multiculturalism’s promise of gradual convergence illusory. [35]
Leaders across Europe—hardly susceptible to caricature as ‘far-Right—have themselves admitted the problem: German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned in 2010 that multiculturalism in Germany had ‘utterly failed’,[36] while British Prime Minister David Cameron echoed the same concern in Britain a few months later, citing the emergence of ghettoised communities estranged from national life.[37] More recently, the current UK Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, in a speech he has since disavowed, warned of Britain becoming an ‘island of strangers’,[38] a phrase that crystallised, however fleetingly, the unease his predecessors had already voiced.
The interaction of these two vectors produces a distinctive geography. Western nations are already fragmenting into three types of zones:
Zone A: urban enclaves where non-native populations dominate,[39] often non-contiguous but defensible, akin to France’s ‘zones urbaine sensibles’ (sensitive urban zones)[40] or the migrant-dense corridors of northern England.[41]
Zone B: mixed regions where instability will be fiercest, particularly capital cities where state authority still exerts influence.[42]
Zone C: largely contiguous native-dominated areas, comparable to the French regions voting National Rally in 2024, forming bases for counter-mobilisation.[43]
Over time, migration flows are likely to propel further assortative segregation: indigenous populations abandoning major cities (‘white flight’), migrants consolidating in enclaves.[44] Urban centres may slip into the condition once described by US military theorists as ‘feral cities’—Mogadishu being the epitome—ungoverned, unpoliceable, and unsafe, but still minimally functional.[45] This pattern mirrors the Balkan wars of the 1990s, when once-integrated communities disintegrated into warring factions with startling speed.[46]
Unlike classic understandings of civil wars as clashes between distinct armies along the lines of the English or American Civil Wars, future Western conflicts are more likely to be fought by militias, paramilitaries and communal defence groups.[47] Small arms, explosives, improvised devices and drones—whether for direct attack or arson—will dominate. More strategically significant than weaponry, however, will be infrastructure sabotage.[48] Food distribution, energy and utilities are inherently vulnerable; their disruption multiplies instability and intensifies demographic reshuffling. Anti-status quo groups across Left and Right already grasp this logic.[49]
The state, stripped of legitimacy, will be a reactive and brittle actor.[50] Lacking the ability to mobilise through patriotism or collective tradition, elites will rely on whatever fragments of the armed forces and security apparatus they can pay or persuade.[51] Their role will be reduced to defending a handful of fortified ‘Green Zones’, while the wider polity unravels.[52]
The strategic lesson is clear. What is emerging in Western societies is not ‘civil unrest’, still less the sporadic convulsions of ‘contentious politics’. It is the creeping advance of civil war—dirty, protracted, and shaped by revolt, ethno-religious division, and infrastructural vulnerability.[53] To dismiss such forecasts as ‘extreme’ is to ignore that they are now woven into public consciousness.[54] As history has often shown, wars long in the making appear sudden only to those who refused to read the signs.[55]
Silence in the Ivory Tower: Why Denial Is Not a Strategy
While the shape of disorder is already visible, the institutions tasked with confronting it have remained conspicuously silent, which is itself a symptom of the deeper crisis. The reception of the thesis that Western societies are edging towards civil war exposes a stark tension between public recognition, set against elite evasion and academic denial.[56] Among broad swathes of the citizenry, the idea resonates with unsettling clarity.[57] Many confess that they had long intuited such a decline but lacked the language or confidence to articulate it.[58] Hearing the diagnosis stated brings a paradoxical relief: their fears are not madness but shared perception.
Reactions from official circles are less forthcoming, though no less revealing. Within strategic and defence establishments, the issue has occasionally surfaced. Reports suggest that civil conflict has been discussed at Cabinet level in Britain, even if only obliquely, though no government has yet admitted openly to planning for that contingency.[59] The silence is itself instructive: to acknowledge preparation for civil war would be to concede its plausibility. Yet the steady trickle of retired police chiefs, former civil servants and security officials privately voicing concern indicates that the thesis is apprehended even if never formally endorsed.[60]
Academia operates at an even more glacial pace. Scholarly engagement with the themes of legitimacy, trust and societal fragmentation is not absent—volumes of work attest to the collapse of social capital across the West—but what is missing is the willingness to connect these well-known phenomena to their political implications. Trust, after all, functions as the currency of social life; when it evaporates, societies suffer the equivalent of economic bankruptcy.[61] Civil war theory is explicit: polarisation, disillusionment with normal politics, and yawning gaps between public expectations and elite delivery are the classic precursors to violent upheaval.[62] Yet scholars too often look away, preferring euphemism or retreating into the abstract.
A powerful taboo exacerbates this avoidance. Academics and ‘radicalisation experts’ habitually refuse to engage with the very materials in which warnings of civil strife are most clearly articulated.[63] Detailed tracts—Our Muslim Troubles and Crown-Pitchfork-Crescent being notable examples—are ignored, not because they lack methodical rigour but because they emanate from sources deemed ideologically unacceptable.[64] The result is a curious paradox: scholars who dissected al-Qaeda or ISIS with clinical neutrality are apt to dismisses domestic anti-status quo writings as unworthy of serious study. In doing so, they forfeit the chance to understand the intellectual currents driving unrest in their own societies.[65]
This studied avoidance is particularly glaring given the proliferation of literature—both fictional and analytical—envisioning civil conflict in the West. Dystopian novels such as Stephen Marche’s The Next Civil War (2022) or Omar Akkad’s American War (2018) enjoy respectable circulation as ‘polite company’ thought-experiments, while more incendiary works like Jean Raspail’s Camp of the Saints continue to find new readership, their prescience acknowledged in hushed tones.[66] That such texts, whether literary or polemical, are discussed widely in anti-status quo circles but barely glanced at in academic ones underscores the gulf between elite discourse and public unease.
The strategic logic underpinning the argument is not esoteric. The warning signs—erosion of trust, delegitimised politics, social disintegration, elite denial—have long been legible.[67] What is missing is not evidence, but courage. Those within the system, to extend the metaphor, remain crouched in the trench. They can see as well as anyone that the enemy is closing, but they prefer to keep their heads down. The difference lies only in who is willing to break cover.
The irony is that what orthodox opinion dismisses as ‘extreme’ is increasingly apprehended as obvious, while those with most to lose—citizens in the centre ground—have already internalised the grim calculus.[68] The strategic question is not whether civil conflict is possible, but why those tasked with studying, preventing, or preparing for it persist in averting their gaze.
The Expectation Gap: Elite Overproduction and the Generation Left Behind
Denial in the ivory tower is one thing; the lived collapse of expectation is another. And it is here, in the daily erosion of prospects, that the fault lines are most graphically exposed. What now looms largest is not simply the question of legitimacy—already ebbing—but the diminishing belief that politics can deliver tangible improvements in material and social conditions. Increasingly, governments appear less as engines of progress than as managers of decline, presiding over falling living standards and narrowing horizons of hope.[69] It is this conviction—that politics no longer remedies but merely presides over decay—that nudges populations toward extra-political alternatives, and gives civil conflict its unsettling tenability.
The measurable dimensions of this breakdown are clearest in the economic sphere. Younger generations across the West are materially disadvantaged compared to their parents at equivalent ages.[70] Their prospects for stable employment are diminished; their savings and pensions meagre;[71] and their likelihood of owning homes drastically reduced.[72] Britain offers a telling metric: graduate jobs in 2023 fell by 32% in a single year,[73] an abrupt contraction emblematic of what Peter Turchin has described as ‘elite overproduction’.[74]
The structural nature of this predicament ensures it cannot be resolved through incremental reform. Moreover, technological disruption threatens to sharpen the divide: artificial intelligence looms over white-collar professions just as globalisation and offshoring gutted blue-collar industries.[75] The result is a swelling cohort of educated but underemployed young people, equipped with grievances and thwarted ambition—a combination that has historically proven combustible.[76]
Economic frustration bleeds into social disintegration. Younger cohorts find it increasingly difficult to replicate the cohesive communities in which they were raised.[77] Their personal lives are marked by instability in relationships, financial precarity and declining health.[78] They face the paradox of living with ‘Third World levels of violence’ in societies that have yet to develop the defensive reflexes such environments demand.[79]
Women and girls bear the brunt of this insecurity. Activities once considered unremarkable—running in a park, attending festivals, or gathering at public events—are increasingly fraught with risk.[80] In Britain, statistics record rape offences standing at their highest recorded level, doubling in number over the past decade,[81] with reports of a sixfold increase in ‘stranger rape’.[82] Insistence by public commentators that such dangers are exaggerated or illusory[83] has become not merely unconvincing but inflammatory, fuelling anger rather than pacifying it.[84]
Some may argue that populations, softened by cheap entertainment and distracted by digital diversions, will acquiesce to decline. Yet the history of ‘bread and circuses’ suggest otherwise.[85] Pacification through indulgence rarely succeeds for long. Indeed, the implicit message—‘we are exploiting you, but you are too distracted or degraded to resist’—is not stabilising but incendiary.[86] Far from defusing resentment, it magnifies the anger of those who recognise their deprivation.
Taken together, these trends constitute more than the routine upheavals of democratic politics. They are the hallmarks of structural failure accelerating toward breakup. When legitimacy is spent, when younger generations recognise their prospects as structurally foreclosed, and when social trust collapses into fear, the conditions are set for chronic instability.[87] These are not isolated grievances but strategic portents of a civilisation that can no longer uphold the architecture of its own stability.
Riots Without Leaders, Narratives Without Rival
If the expectation gap defines the structural pathology, the waves of civic unrest that are multiplying across Western cities unmask its operational face. Whether in London, Paris, Amsterdam, or Melbourne, these disturbances signal not episodic volatility but systemic fragility.[88] Scale, nature, and pattern all matter, and together they sketch a picture of governance stretched thin and authority hollowed out.[89]
States are well-practised in quelling occasional outbreaks of violent protest, by redeploying resources. Yet this capacity is finite. Inner-city riots in London in 2011 took a week to contain;[90] since then, police numbers and training have declined.[91] The prospect of larger, more frequent and multi-city revolts—on the scale of France’s Yellow Vests or the Dutch farmers’ rebellions—is no longer theoretical.[92] The panic that shaped the British authorities’ response to the Southport riots of 2024, following the murder of three young girls by a young man of immigrant background,[93] or its hasty relocation of migrant centres to avoid further clashes, betrayed the limits of the state’s margin of manoeuvre. These are not strategic solutions, but desperate fire-fighting measures.
At first glance, the local and spasmodic quality of such protests might appear reassuring to governments since the absence of a centralised leadership or command structure suggests there is no movement to infiltrate, co-opt, or negotiate with.[94] Yet this very decentralisation is the deeper problem. A movement without leaders is a movement resistant to the traditional tools of statecraft.[95] Suppressing it is like battling quicksand—the harder one struggles, the deeper the entrapment, and in the end the effort is futile.
Nor should decentralisation be mistaken for incoherence. Studies of modern insurgencies and terror networks show that leaderless, polycephalic movements can operate with striking strategic agility. Their strength lies not in central command but in the adoption of a compelling narrative. Such a narrative does not dictate operations; rather, it frames the meaning of events.[96] It identifies grievances, names the outgroup enemy, offers a plausible course of action, and summons a ‘conscience community’ into being. When it takes root, no orders are required—participants intuit the logic themselves.[97]
In Europe, such a narrative has taken root around the perception of demographic displacement. Native populations, increasingly convinced that they are being deliberately sidelined in their own countries, interpret migration not as natural movement but as engineered transformation, often in defiance of democratic opposition.[98] This narrative has not been invented by extremists; it has spread organically into public discourse, precisely because it resonates with lived experience.[99] The political class, instead of addressing it with an alternative vision, has turned to censorship, criminalisation of dissent and the prosecution of opposition figures.[100] Yet confident authority does not behave so frantically. Resorting to censorship is the hallmark not of strength but of desperation.
The deeper strategic failure lies in the system’s intellectual exhaustion.[101] If the displacement narrative has traction, why not counter it with a superior narrative—one that speaks to shared belonging, collective purpose, or national renewal?[102] The answer is bleakly simple: because no such narrative exists within the governing class.[103] What passes for the status quo is no longer an ‘idea’ in any meaningful sense. It is managerial drift, bereft of loyalty and incapable of inspiring belief.[104]
The significance of the current wave of marches and protests in somewhere like the UK[105] lies not only in taxing the state’s resources but laying bare its crisis of legitimacy and vision.[106] Scholarly work underscores that riots are not aberrations but reveal political ‘terrains of struggle’—outsized confrontations born of unaddressed grievances. The Eurozone’s ‘rule-by-numbers’ technocracy[107] has further stripped governance of narrative legitimacy, as citizens feel administered almost in imperial fashion rather than represented.[108]
Recurring structural protests are both organised and dispersed, which underscores the futility of countering dispersed networks with centralised tools.[109] Where legitimate institutions fail to channel discontent, the marginalised resort to collective action—rioting becomes a desperate expression of voice. Analysis frames these events as manifestations of a broader, persistent legitimacy crisis—defined by broken procedural trust, eroded accountability and an absence of integrative national purpose.[110] In short, these are not isolated disturbances but a systemic breach of governance: a state without legitimacy, without direction, and without a future.
Global Cities, Fragile Fortresses
Riots and protest dramatise not only the brittleness of state authority but also the structural fragility of the very spaces where power and population now concentrate. The processes of societal polarisation and collapsing institutional trust are not strictly irreversible, but reality dictates that reversal is painfully slow, often taking generations. The so-called ‘peace walls’ of Belfast—erected in the early 1970s to divide Protestant and Catholic communities—still stand today, a testament to how long mistrust endures even after overt violence subsides.[111]
Three decades ago, most Western states could still be described as cohesive national communities. Today, they resemble patchworks of tribes: identity-based, virtually segregated and increasingly fearful of one another.[112] What has emerged is not a temporary rift but a calamitous transformation—from national societies into fragmented polities.[113] Repairing such a condition will take decades, and even then, only after conflict has likely burned its way through.[114]
The fragility of global cities is among the starkest features of the present crisis. Dependent on their hinterlands for survival, they are uniquely vulnerable to disruption. Starving a city has long been the surest path to conquest—a lesson that remains relevant today.[115] Modern metropolises, however, are far more exposed than their predecessors. Their very existence hinges on continuous flows of food, fuel, water and electricity—systems notoriously hard to shield.[116] Urban geographers have long argued that city life is a precarious balance; under present conditions of unrest, that balance verges on collapse.[117]
London exemplifies this trend. Once the national capital of the British people, it has become a ‘global city’ in which natives are a shrinking minority.[118] After the Brexit referendum, in which London voted decisively to remain in the European Union, senior figures such as the current Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy, went so far as to advocate for ‘Londependence’,[119] a form of quasi-secession from the rest of Britain.[120] This episode underscored a deeper reality: many global cities no longer view themselves as part of their nations but as semi-autonomous nodes within global commerce.
By contrast, provincial populations increasingly see such cities as hostile terrain.[121] This is not merely cultural disaffection but strategic vulnerability. In the event of serious conflict, cities will be prime targets, their dependence on fragile logistical arteries inviting disruption.[122] And there will be no shortage of actors, particularly in the rural sphere, eager to sever those arteries.
The rural-urban clash is likely to assume strategic prominence. Christophe Guilluy’s landmark la France périphérique (2014) captures the chasm between metropolitan elites and the lower-middle class and rural hinterlands—communities that increasingly see themselves as abandoned and estranged from national politics.[123] This phenomenon is rooted in long-standing anti-urban sentiment with cities viewed as morally vacuous, economically extractive and culturally alien.[124] Cities are regarded no longer as centres of prosperity but objects of scorn—depicted as degenerate, parasitic, islands within their own nations.
As evidence from France and the Netherlands, along with Spain, Ireland and the UK, already indicates, this sentiment fuels political discord, deepens segregation, hardens enclaves and produces zones of conflict.[125] In conditions of serious strife, this could take the form of sieges, with rural and small-town populations pressing against urban districts. Given current demographics, such conflicts would likely favour native populations—a prospect that explains both the urgency and the apprehension surrounding the possibility of confrontation.[126]
Underlying these fissures are economic realities. Stagnant wages, debt accumulation and job precarity are not ‘early warnings’ but active drivers of social dislocation.[127] For generations, the ideology of progress in the West rested on a simple promise: that material conditions would steadily improve, that each generation would surpass the last.[128] This faith underwrote every other social and political claim of progressivism.[129]
That promise has been broken. Data from the US Government confirms that today’s young people earn a fraction of their parents’ real income at equivalent ages.[130] Their grandchildren will inherit debts that stretch back generations. At the same time, the cultural achievements of earlier generations are dismissed or dismantled.[131] Progress, once imagined as steady improvement, is now experienced as dispossession: economic, cultural, and even existential.
Taken together, these trends describe not a passing disturbance but a structural transformation of Western societies. Polarisation has become entrenched, cities have grown alien and fragile, the rural-urban divide maps directly onto political conflict, and economic decline has destroyed the ideological anchor of progress.[132] The result is not simply malaise, but a combustible strategic environment in which legitimacy has evaporated, grievances are mounting, and the architecture of stability is visibly crumbling.
Networks, Immigration and the Erosion of Social Capital
From the spatial fragility of cities to the connective power of networks, the forces of instability now converge around three interlocking dynamics: digital mobilisation, mass immigration, and the erosion of social capital. Insurgency, like any social movement, depends on two core functions: resource mobilisation and narrative framing.[133] Digital networks and social media ecosystems now provide the infrastructure for both,[134] enabling movements to draw in supporters across multiple tiers of commitment.[135]
Online networks help produce a tier of ‘prospects’. First, there are passive supporters who merely surround a movement with clicks, ‘likes’ and reposts. Here, social media excels, propagating ideas at minimal cost and transforming private discontent into visible collective grievance.[136] Beyond them stand active supporters, who create content, supply intelligence, leak information, or facilitate infiltration. The example of WikiLeaks demonstrates how digital ecosystems can magnify the reach and effectiveness of such actors.[137] Such ideational insurgencies gain traction precisely because the passive offline layer remains resilient, and though anonymous in the digital realm, its adherents feel bound by ritual and a sense of shared fate.[138]
The most consequential, however, are the adherents—the disciplined minority prepared to act beyond the law. These include street fighters, saboteurs, kidnappers and assassins, as well as those able to infiltrate organisations and conduct interrogations. Within this tier, the distinction between ‘trusted soldiers’ and ‘prospects’ is critical, much as motorcycle gangs differentiate hardened members from aspiring thugs. Digital media may generate prospects, but trust—the lifeblood of these networks—can only be forged through shared risk and face-to-face bonds.[139] For adherents, digital exposure is more liability than an asset, since state surveillance excels in monitoring the online domain but remains comparatively blind to offline networks.[140]
Thus, while social media catalyses mobilisation among passive and active supporters, it simultaneously impedes the clandestine coordination of the adherents who ultimately drive violent action. Digital ecosystems, in short, hasten the spread of insurgent narratives but also push the most dangerous actors back into the cover of clandestine activity.[141]
The most potent source of agitation in Western societies is mass immigration.[142] It stands at the centre of both elite policy and popular resistance. The consequences are tangible: wage suppression, inflated housing demand, strains on welfare and public services, heightened crime[143]—particularly sexual assault[144]—and increasingly overt acts of cultural iconoclasm.[145] For many, immigration represents not adaptation but displacement, imposed from above and maintained even when electorates have voted against it.
When populations feel like ‘strangers in their own land’, the resulting charge is political dynamite.[146] Territorial affinity is not some abstract principle, but the core of many, if not most, people’s sense of identity.[147] When that tie is perceived as severed—and especially when large sections of the population conclude they did not choose their dispossession—the shattering can become a call for revolt. It is precisely the emotional potency of dispossession that gives such narratives their mobilising power.[148]
The deeper fault line lies in the collapse of social capital. As Robert Putnam demonstrated in Bowling Alone (2000), social capital sustains societies just as financial capital sustains economies: it underwrites trust, cooperation, and resilience.[149] Yet subsequent research, including by Putnam himself, has confirmed across a range of disciplines that large-scale ethnic diversity corrodes this capital.[150] In practice, diverse communities display diminished trust, weaker voluntary associations, higher levels of crime and heightened alienation.[151]
Putnam once suggested that the benefits of multiculturalism might eventually outweigh the costs, with new solidarities emerging over time. Two decades on, the opposite has occurred. Cohesion has not deepened but further deteriorated, leaving societies brittle and volatile.[152] Few seriously contest the decline itself,[153] yet what passes for debate has become surreal. Instead of addressing the causes, policymakers oscillate between doubling down on the very forces driving disintegration, or—most perversely—punishing those who voice disquiet.[154] Drained of integrity, unconstrained immigration has imposed cultural transformation without consent, and the political establishment offers only denial, escalation, or coercion. The conditions for implosion are not speculative; they are embedded into the very structure of the present order.
Decentralised digital networks, mass immigration, and collapsing social capital form a mutually reinforcing triad of instability. Digital platforms amplify the spread of grievance; immigration provides its content; and diversity corrodes the cohesion required to absorb shocks. Governments, rather than confronting these dynamics with persuasive narratives or effective remedies, have relied on censorship and repression—the hallmarks of insecure rather than confident power. The result is a polity in which narratives of displacement and betrayal thrive unchecked, while the state increasingly resembles an authority without belief, without legitimacy, and without strategy
The Breaking of the Social Contract
Beneath these accelerants lies the decisive fracture: the breaking of the social contract—the bond that once tied citizens, state and generations together. The decline of institutional trust in the West is not the product of a single event but of cumulative decisions and ideological turns. Philosophers and poets have long pointed to modernity’s contradictions—imperial overreach, the false promise of universalist utopias, and the moral wreckage of the World Wars. Yet more proximate causes have proved decisive. The ‘Culture War’ since the 1960s has left Western societies asking whether their own survival is even desirable.[155] For a not insignificant share of the radical Left, the answer has been a frank ‘no’—a stance now echoed in polling that records a rising tolerance for political violence, even an emerging ‘assassination culture’ amongst this political faction.[156] Here, strange alliances with Islamist activists take shape, bound not by a common vision but by a common resentment.[157]
Equally consequential has been the colonisation of governance by economic orthodoxy. Nations are no longer imagined as communities bound by history or mutual obligation, but as balance sheets to be managed.[158] Citizens, once participants in a political community, are increasingly treated as tax units whose passports function less as civic markers than as financial locators.[159] The rise of the financial technocrat is no accident: today’s ruling class is drawn not from the ranks of statesmen but from high finance. Rishi Sunak,[160] groomed in hedge funds before becoming British Prime Minister; Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney,[161] who moved seamlessly from Goldman Sachs to the helm of two central banks; and Mario Draghi,[162] the central banker who became Italy’s premier—all embody a transformation in which government is less the art of statesmanship than the arithmetic of accountancy.
The most decisive act, however, was the adoption of mass migration and multiculturalism as state doctrine. In Britain, Tony Blair’s government announced in 2000 its driving political purpose to re-make the country through large-scale immigration. According to one of Blair’s advisors, Andrew Neather, part of the aim in doing so was intentionally to ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity’.[163] This deliberate reshaping of the demographic and cultural fabric was not merely policy but a redefinition of the nation itself—and, for many, a breach of the social contract, with the Institute of Race Relations declaring in 2007 that Tony Blair had left the country ‘more divided—by race, class and status—than he found it’.[164]
Edmund Burke’s conception of society as a covenant ‘not only between those that are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’ underscores the depth of contemporary alienation.[165] By that measure, the growing recognition among native Europeans that demographic replacement is no longer a spectre but a fact marks the moment of reckoning. What may once have been derided as an ‘extreme’ narrative has entered common discourse, if only with reluctance.[166] At that point, the social contract ceases to bind. What was once whispered as private anxiety is now voiced as public expectation: that the inherited order is ending, and with it the trust that once held the polity together.
Civil wars ultimately hinge on the loyalty of security forces. The state may assume that armies will act decisively in its defence, but it is a dangerous wager to expect rank-and-file soldiers to employ lethal force against their own families and neighbours.[167] More plausibly, militaries will be tasked with defending regime enclaves, critical infrastructure and cultural treasures, while also guarding against the leakage of weapons into wider conflict.
Here the risks are severe. The proliferation of arms from foreign theatres looms large. Should Russia emerge from the Ukraine war emboldened, it could conceivably exact retribution on Europe by funnelling weapons westward—man-portable missiles, explosives, and grenades—transforming street-level conflict into something far deadlier.[168] The return of thousands of embittered, combat-hardened veterans from the war would compound the danger, expanding the ranks of fighters in an already unstable West.[169]
Can politics arrest this descent? The answer is uncertain. Anti-status quo parties—Reform in Britain, the AfD in Germany, and the National Rally in France are leading in many polls.[170] Yet in addition to electoral headwinds they also face systemic sabotage through ‘lawfare’ and bureaucratic obstruction.[171] Even if elected, their capacity to implement radical reform would be blunted by entrenched opposition. There is no credible off-ramp within existing political rules; the system has rendered its own renewal impossible.
Some states, particularly those in Central and Eastern Europe, are temporarily insulated. Poland, Hungary, and the Visegrád countries, having endured Soviet domination, remain resistant to new transnational orthodoxies emanating from Brussels.[172] By contrast, France and Britain linger at the brink, their divisions deepening, their legitimacy thinned to the point of dissolution.
Policy Implications: Between Prescription and Futility
Readers who have come this far may be less inclined to ask so what? than to ask what now? Having traced the fissures rending Western societies, the importance of which is self-evident, the question becomes whether anything can be done to alter the trajectory. As scholars of war and strategy, our stance is necessarily diagnostic: strategic theory equips us to illuminate structural forces and clarify their logic, not to dictate how societies should be ordered or how lives should be lived. We are not reformers or visionaries, but observers. Yet would we be derelict in our duty if we offered no indication at all of what responses might, in principle, be possible?
From the analysis above, twelve policy signposts emerge:
1) Re-legitimate democratic authority
End practices that teach voters their choices don’t matter (reversals of political commitments, re-runs of elections, procedural obstruction). Publicly commit to executing clear mandates, tighten rules against ‘lawfare’ that nullifies democratically endorsed preferences, and widen transparency around major decisions to restore the sense that politics is real and corrigible.
2) Confront leaderless unrest with principled doctrine, not improvisation
Plan for decentralised, polycephalic mobilisations that cannot be co-opted or negotiated with. Build capacity for simultaneous multi-city events, improve surge policing, and intelligence fusion; abandon ad-hoc ‘firefighting’ that signals brittleness.
3) Harden critical infrastructure
Assume infrastructure disruption (food, energy, water, logistics) will be a primary vector of coercion. Map chokepoints, add redundancy and pre-position repair and security capability. Treat global cities as ‘fragile fortresses’ whose lifelines depend upon the support—not the alienation—of their surrounding regions.
4) Address the rural–urban divide
Resource the periphery by rebuilding connective tissue between metropoles and hinterlands. Anticipate siege-logic dynamics while reducing the political symbolism of cities as ‘islands apart’.
5) Reject censorship and replace with a superior integrative narrative
Censorship and criminalisation of dissent advertise weakness and feed grievance. Articulate a credible, shared national story (belonging, reciprocity, purpose) that can outcompete displacement/betrayal narratives rather than trying to suppress them and thereby confirming them.
6) Rebuild social capital as security policy
Treat trust-building (associations, local institutions, safe public space—especially for women and girls) as a strategic objective. Prioritise visible law-enforcement against predatory crime; measure and publish trust/cohesion indicators alongside economic metrics, even if they offend against the myths of multicultural orthodoxy.
7) Reset immigration policy to the constraint of consent and capacity
Link intake to demonstrated absorptive capacity (housing, services, employment) and the maintenance of civic trust. Shift the emphasis from abstract multiculturalism to integration and common civic identity; recognise that unmanaged inflows corrode consent and legitimacy.
8) Close the generational expectation gap
Target youth prospects (work, housing, family formation) and tackle ‘elite overproduction’ dynamics that produce credentialed-but-blocked cohorts. Treat AI/globalisation shocks to middle-class work as a strategic risk factor, not just an economic curiosity.
9) Clarify the role of the armed forces in domestic crisis
Plan for missions that prioritise protection of critical infrastructure and cultural assets over coercion of the population. Establish civil-military red lines (e.g., lethal force against citizens) and bolster controls against weapons leakage from external conflicts; prepare for reintegration pathways for combat-experienced returnees.
10) Acknowledge the external–internal insurgency feedback loop
Resource counter-networking against transnational mobilisation (digital and diasporic), while preserving civil liberties. Assume domestic actors will learn from foreign theatres; align internal security, border and information policies accordingly.
11) Reform universities: overcome the academic taboo
Incentivise the open study of ‘dissident’ literatures and ‘impolite’ data rather than resorting to lazy labelling that dismisses majoritarian opinion as extreme merely because it departs from progressive orthodoxy. Build research programmes that connect legitimacy/trust findings to concrete political implications.
12) Adopt an ‘organic crisis’ mindset
Stop framing the situation as episodic unrest amenable to routine fixes. Accept that turbulence is structural and long-term. Set expectations honestly without false optimism, sequence reforms that are actually feasible, and prioritise mitigation and resilience where reversal is unlikely.
Together these signposts suggest what a serious agenda for mitigation might look like. Yet to sketch them is also to admit their near impossibility. Each demands political imagination, institutional courage and social cohesion at the very moment when Western societies, especially in Europe, are least capable of summoning them. To re-legitimize democracy would require elites to abandon the very stratagems—lawfare, technocratic evasion, disdain for popular mandates—by which they have secured their power. To rebuild social capital would mean reversing over three decades of policies that corroded it. To close the expectation gap would mean dismantling interests vested in credentialism and exclusion. Even the modest ambition of salvaging fragments of civilisation in collapse—museums, services, civic memory—may prove more an exercise in triage than renewal.
History offers little comfort. When order fails, peoples seldom reform their way out of crisis; they endure breakdown and then reconstitute authority around older verities and harsher disciplines. That, too, is a policy trajectory, though not one chosen but imposed. The sober truth may be that the most realistic ‘recommendation’ is less about avoiding fracture than about preparing for what will follow it: the arduous reconstitution of authority and meaning has so often been the fate of polities once their inherited order has dissolved.
Conclusion
This assessment has attempted something straightforward: to identify the forces pushing developed states—above all in Europe—towards social fracture and the prospect of severe civil strife, and to draw out the strategic implications. It has also sought to show that the sources of these tensions are neither hidden nor mysterious. They are well documented, albeit in disparate form, across the serious scholarly literature.
In that regard, the academic consensus on civil war causation is not obscure; it is, in truth, little more than the plain sense of political theory that Europe’s ruling elites ignore or pretend not to understand. Thomas Hobbes himself spelled it out in Leviathan: ‘The obligation of subjects to the sovereign is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth, by which he is able to protect them’.[173] When rulers cannot protect, they cannot command obedience. It is that simple—and that deadly.
Yet today’s elites, convinced of their own permanence, behave as though exempt from the oldest rule in politics: lose legitimacy, lose everything. Academics can rehearse the point in 10,000 words or 100,000; reality requires far fewer: legitimacy is perishable, anger is rational, consequences are unavoidable.
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