Civil War: What a war researcher predicts for Europe over the next five years

A professor of military studies at King's College London has written that Western Europe is heading towards civil war. He puts the probability at over fifty percent. He calls this a conservative estimate. The continent's reaction consists of a proposed regulation, a labeling of the author as right-wing, and a stockpile of weapons that no one can count. One doesn't have to agree with the thesis. One should simply be aware that it exists, who advocates it, and where it was published.

The professor you'd rather not quote
David Betz is Professor of War in the Modern World at Department of War Studies, King's College London and Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. His essay “The Future of War Is Civil War” was peer-reviewed and published in the journal Social Sciences in 2023. He has also published two essays in Military Strategy Magazine, 2023 and 2025, as well as a joint work with strategy theorist MLR Smith on the Strategic anatomy of coming civil warsThis is not a Telegram channel. This is the institution that trains Britain's officers.

His contributing factors sound uncomfortably familiar: the collapse of social capital, asymmetric multiculturalism, the perceived status reversal of the majority population, the urban-rural divide, and vulnerable infrastructure as triggers . He cites a serious knife attack, a car rampage, or a particularly unjust court ruling as the spark . Court ruling. Remember that word for later.

The arithmetic that nobody likes to calculate
Betz doesn't rely on gut feeling, but on the models of Barbara F. Walter, whose book on the origins of civil wars provides the basis. Research estimates where the symptoms are present. A four percent probability of conflict per year, or about eighteen percent over five years.Betz counts at least ten Western countries in this risk category and includes the risk of infection in his calculations. That such Probability calculations regarding the civil war Just because they're not new doesn't make them any less harmful.

His real criticism isn't directed at politicians, but at his own profession. Strategic research simply rules out civil war in the West because wealthy states with stable governments are considered immune. That was a convenient assumption as long as it held true. Betz's answer to the question of what generals should do now is so dispassionate it's almost disheartening: they should obtain political instructions that allow them to even plan for the eventuality. Currently, they aren't allowed to.

35 million arguments without a registration number
The second figure doesn't come from a professor, but from the European Commission itself. There are [number] in the EU. Approximately 35 million illegal firearms in civilian handsThe Schengen Information System currently lists only about 630,000 items as stolen or lost. This is no longer an underreporting; it's a ratio of one to fifty-five.

Since May 2022, Europol has been warning that the proliferation of firearms and explosives in Ukraine could fuel trade into the EU via established smuggling routes and online platforms . The agency explicitly states that the threat is likely to increase after the war ends. In an internal letter to the Council, it reported on criminal networks that are operating or planning to smuggle significant quantities of firearms and ammunition, including military weapons. An internal document from the German Foreign Office dated February 2024 quotes Europol as saying that systematic cross-referencing of data is not possible during data exchange within the EU.

Four years after the initial warning, in February 2026, the Commission presented a proposal for new EU-wide regulations . The justification: existing law only regulates legal possession and legal transfer. Thus, for three decades, the continent has refined rules for sport shooters, overlooking the fact that the other thirty-five million firearms are not located at shooting ranges.

The counter-argument that must be taken seriously
Betz has critics. Their best argument isn't the accusation that he's pandering to the right wing. It's historical. The New Statesman lays its groundwork. Status reversal diagnosis alongside Enoch Powell's 1968 speech And the series of British civil war prophecies before and after: the Ulster Crisis of 1912, the forged Zinoviev letter of 1924, the miners' strike of 1984. None of them led to civil war. Fear returns as soon as a dominant class feels threatened. Yet civil war never materializes.

But this criticism draws a conclusion that even Betz's opponents are unlikely to find palatable. If civil war rhetoric is a recurring political script, then its third act is always the same: proclaim an existential threat, build up the apparatus against it, and keep the threat just far enough away so that the apparatus remains . The danger, they argue, is not civil war, but the authoritarian state that is created to prevent it. Anyone who wants to see what this looks like in practice need only speculate, but look to Sweden.

This puts the citizen caught between two predictions, both of which are unfavorable. If the professor is right, conflict ensues. If his critics are right, the apparatus designed to prevent it is established – and remains in place.

The drawbridge has already been ordered.
Betz's other book, which hardly anyone cites, is the most revealing. It's called "The Guarded Age" and it's about... Fortifications in the 21st centuryWalls, barriers, and secured zones. To understand the war researcher's prediction, one doesn't need to read his probability calculations, but rather his inventory: Construction is already underway. Just not at the outer borders.

Europe has a peer-reviewed civil war forecast and responds with a jurisdictional review. It has 35 million weapons in circulation and 630,000 of them registered. There's an agency that's been warning for four years. It has a foreign ministry that's known for two years that no one can verify the data. And when things finally erupt, they'll claim no one could have seen it coming – even though it's been clearly cited in a peer-reviewed journal for three years!