The Future of War Is Civil War

This essay discusses the more potent forces driving the West toward a future of war which is civil war centred upon the destruction of ‘global’ cities through exploitation of their intrinsic instability. The first part of this essay will establish the plausibility of its main premise, namely the inevitability of outright, active, and wide-scale civil war in North America and Western Europe. I shall demonstrate that there are well-understood indicators showing that our current societal arrangements are failing at an accelerating rate. The second part will briefly address the strengths and weaknesses of the extant future war literature, focusing mainly upon influential works of fiction rather than the quasi-rigorous outpourings of the ‘futurology’ discipline. In the third part, I will describe the shape or character of the wars to come which, in short form, I expect to exhibit the following: a distinctive rural versus urban dimension; jarring societal splits along the fracture lines of multiculturalism; a ‘hi-lo’ mix of weapons featuring extensive innovative reuse of civil tech for military purpose, particularly attacks on infrastructure; and a ‘shock of the old’ reversion-mutation to savage tactics, notably the use of famine and destruction of shelter as tools of coercion. This last section of the paper is partly based on approximately ten years of examining the darker corners of the internet listening to what incipient revolutionaries, neo-anarchists, and want-to-be militiamen think and talk about

Strengths and weaknesses · Anarchism and Radical Politics · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence

• Urbicide

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• Bowling alone

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• The Resilient City

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• The challenges of studying 4chan and the Alt-Right

  Open Access•Thomas Colley, Martin Moore•New Media & Society•2020

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• Ethnic Diversity, Economic and Cultural Contexts, and Social Trust

  C Ziller•Social Forces•2014

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• Target Choice During Extreme Events

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• E Pluribus Unum

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• The J-Curve and Power Struggle Theories of Collective Violence

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• On Debating and Falsifying Theories of Collective Violence

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• Does Ethnic Diversity Have a Negative Effect on Attitudes towards the Community? A Longitudinal Analysis of the Causal Claims within the Ethnic Diversity and Social Cohesion Debate

  Open Access•James Laurence, Lee Bentley•European Sociological Review•2016

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