Tribal War is Coming, Part I

Civil Conflict Is Not What You Think It Is

For Part II, click here.

For Part III, click here.

If you prefer the audio of this article, click here.

Nothing in this article amounts to an endorsement of or a call for violence of any kind, political or otherwise.

We have waited to write this article. First, because the groundwork for its conclusion in part III was laid in our earlier articles on Folkishness[1][2]. Second, because recently a war studies professor explained on several large platforms that tribal war is coming, and now is the right time to confront this topic. Most are not ready for it.

We at Imperium have been saying for years that re-tribalization is both necessary and inevitable. We have explained why this is, laying the theoretical and conceptual groundwork to understand its return. But most people simply cannot get their heads around this idea—that society is essentially tribal, even in postmodernity. Especially in postmodernity. But academic consensus has been able to get its head around it for a generation. Now people are catching up.

In 2023, David Betz, professor of war studies at King’s College London, wrote an article titled Civil War Comes to the West. This article got a great deal of attention at the time, mostly within the intelligence and security community. In 2025, Prof. Betz did a number of podcast interviews in which he elaborated on the thesis of that article, which we will summarize in this series, while tying it into the analysis of folkishness that we have developed in this Substack. Betz agrees with us on virtually every substantive point we have been making for years. Importantly, he is not some outlier. Far from it—he is representative of the system. He has advised the British government on counterinsurgency and stabilization, and his positions are the consensus positions found in the war studies, urban studies, and insurgency academic literature. He has simply connected the dots.

Very few, even within the radical right, have connected the dots. In fact, due to a sentimental attachment to nationalism, many in our sphere have tried to handwave away the reality and inevitability of tribal conflict in the West. These sentiments are not only wrong, but dangerous and irresponsible. Tribal denialism can no longer be seriously defended. Not a month goes by when someone does not write to us privately to express concerns that what we have been saying is going unheeded, even by those who should know better, who have seen the effects of multiculturalism and who are ostensibly opposed to it. All we can do is to lead the horse to water. To that end, let us lay some foundations.

In the aforementioned articles on folkishness, we sketched out a key concept—pre-political identity:

By pre-political identity we mean every identity up to the level of the polis or nation. Political identity is national identity; pre-political identities would include the family, the clan, the tribe, the folk, etc.¹

The key to understanding political identity (“nationalism”) is to see that it depends on pre-political identity (“folkishness”).

After the revolution, France still had enough of its local alliances and affiliations intact to form the regimental backbone of the Grande Armée, which Napoleon then used to take over Europe. Another illustrative case is post-So­viet Russia, which was outside of the Faustian West and in a different position. When the West pushed over communism, enough of Russia’s feudal (oligarchic) elements remained to put a floor under the headlong collapse it could have suffered.²

You can no more have a strong political identity without strong pre-political identities, than you can have a healthy forest without healthy trees. The one is built out of the other.

Each level (let’s just say family, clan, tribe, folk) is only as strong as the aggregate strength of the prior level. You only have a strong folk if you have strong tribes; you only have a strong tribe if you have strong clans; you only have a strong clan if you have strong families. Each level of pre-political identity depends on the social capital of the prior levels.³

However, liberalism (Betz calls it “post-nationalism”) has thoroughly and methodically deconstructed pre-political identity throughout the West for nigh three generations. The total undermining of patriarchy, its attendant weakening of the family, and a non-existent clan and tribal identity (outside of ethnic enclaves), have resulted in what the radical right has called “atomization”, which has paved the way for the disintermediation of organic social structures such as churches, unions, fraternities, extended families, local leaders, etc. Liberalism has acted as a tapeworm hollowing out any structure that traditionally stood between sovereign political authority and the individual. This has in turn enabled unrestricted multiculturalism.

The problems with multiculturalism have become so acute that even David Cameron and Angela Merkel have weighed in—in 2010. Long before Trump ever stepped on to the scene, Merkel said “Of course the tendency had been to say, ‘Let’s adopt the multicultural concept and live happily side by side, and be happy to be living with each other.’ But this concept has failed, and failed utterly,”⁴ and Cameron said “Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and apart from the mainstream.”⁵

15 years on, and British and German society have deteriorated sharply even from those gloomy assessments. British society—which we will take as a bellwether for the West in general—has a self-conception which is wildly out of step with reality. It is far more fractured than ever before. Certain accepted truths about what British people are like, and are willing to tolerate, no longer hold true. Britain has a much less secure connection to those aspects of its history which have made it stable, peaceful, and prosperous. It no longer believes in almost any of its national myths, including many of those that are central to liberalism itself (such as the heroism of Winston Churchill)—in fact, it considers these myths not only to be false, but disreputable. The Lend-Lease Act in the wake of WWII and the hyper-financialization of the economy have led to persistent structural economic decline. Terrorism is no longer unusual, but an accepted “fact of life in the big cities”. The native British were subjected to unspeakable torture in the shape of industrial-scale rape gangs, which were systematically covered up by the security state for fear that they would upset their victims, and when calls were made to open an inquiry a generation later, the British parliament voted it down 3:1.

The fact is that multiculturalism has drained social capital in nations across the West—it has encouraged factionalism and polarization, while belief in political loyalty has been shattered by “identity politics”, or the rise of pre-political loyalties (“folkishness”) which exclude and are hostile to national loyalties (“civic nationalism”). This is held up rather nakedly when the idea of conscription is broached—the native ethnic Briton is repulsed by the idea of fighting for a country that no longer belongs to him. He feels displaced, and his nativist sentiments are increasingly manifested in a narrative of what the war studies literature calls downgrading, where a once-dominant social majority has lost resources, power, and status. This “downgrading” is simply the technical term for a fact accepted in the academy, and which mainstream propaganda outlets have told you is a “conspiracy theory”—the Great Replacement.

We have rehearsed this sorry state of affairs not because readers will not be aware, but because it is important to understand that—contra the accepted narrative even in dissident politics—the reality of this state of affairs is consensus in mainstream academia. Scholars who study the stability of modern societies are under no illusion as to what’s happening. And they are also united in what this means.

The main threat to the security and prosperity of the West generally, and the UK specifically now, is civil war, not external war. And what I would want to stress is that this calculation on my part has been arrived at by analysis of official British statistics, on British social attitudes, on mainstream academic ideas about social capital, about societal cohesion and political stability, plus long-established, pretty standard theories of civil war causation. British society is fundamentally explosively configured.⁶

This will strike the uninitiated reader as preposterous, and in part III of this series we will address common objections that would paint modern liberal democracies as far more stable than they are.

Part of the problem is the term civil war itself, which invariably conjures up images of the American Civil War, which by civil war standards was somewhat unusual. There will be no rematch of 1861. But to understand just how close we are to civil conflict, we must understand how civil wars happen in the first place.

Civil wars happen, quite naturally, in fractured societies. If a society is not fractured enough, it is sufficiently stable to hold off civil conflict. With its pre-political loyalties mostly moving in the same direction, it possesses enough social capital to support political loyalty, or loyalty to the nation over and above the more local loyalties out of which loyalty to the nation is built. But this does not mean that civil conflict directly correlates with fragmentation—if society is too fractured, civil conflict is also unlikely. While highly fractured societies are unstable, due to their high coordination costs, nobody can gain the upper hand. When insurgency requires coordinating perhaps a dozen factions, a mass movement simply cannot gain momentum, and the sovereign authority can play “divide and conquer”, keeping each faction down in a delicate balancing act, a kind of Bismarckian realpolitik at the intra-state level.

Where civil conflict happens is in societies with a moderate amount of fragmentation—specifically, in societies in which a previously dominant social majority feels that it is losing its place. In this “sweet spot” for civil conflict, the society is fragmented enough to create instability, a feeling of downgrading in much of the population, and disaffected counter-elites who are blocked from social mobility due to the extreme nepotism necessary to hold an elite bloc together under pressure. This is the stuff that mass movements are made of.

We are of course in that sweet spot today, all across the West. Western elites are well aware of this, and are actively working to “solve” the problem. The “solution” to the threat of a mass movement will involve one of two approaches: either a) fragmentation can be rolled back, or b) fragmentation can be accelerated. The former approach is what people in the radical right like Martin Sellner have been calling for, in the form of “remigration”; the latter approach is that being advanced by the governance structure of Western countries. This is what the Great Replacement is all about: Western elites are deliberately and actively pushing our societies toward being too fractured to explode. The Great Replacement is not specifically about anti-whiteness, though in ethnically white countries it necessarily takes anti-white forms. The Great Replacement is more precisely about keeping elites in their positions of dominance, resources from being radically redistributed—and above all, it is about keeping society running.