David Betz | |
|---|---|
| Occupation(s) | Academic, professor |
| Years active | 2002-present |
David J. Betz is a Canadian academic and researcher in the field of war studies. [1] He is professor of war in the modern world at the Department of War Studies, King's College London, having joined the department in 2002.
Betz' 2024 book The Guarded Age: Fortification in the 21st Century [2] has been reviewed for the US Naval Institute, with reviewer Lieutenant Colonel Dillon Fishman describing it as "a trenchant social commentary that speaks to an audience broader than specialists". [3]
He has been broadly cited in British press for his statements on threats to British society, in particular for his public statements that the United Kingdom is, based on comparative analyses, statistically likely to enter a state of civil war within five years from 2025. [4] Betz has featured on several widely viewed British podcasts, including Triggernometry, discussing the risk of civil war in the UK. [5]
Betz's work has been criticised as being in the "porous space between the extreme right and its more mainstream variants", helping to give "air of respectability" to ideas like race war, "that would until recently have been considered beyond the pale". [6] While, in the New Statesman, Phil Tinline compared Betz's predictions to "the fear Enoch Powell stoked in April 1968 in his “rivers of blood” speech." [7]