Civilisation collapses
Studying past collapses could help us prevent and prepare for future collapse
This profile is tailored towards students studying sociology and history, however we expect there to be valuable open research questions that could be pursued by students in other disciplines.
Why is this a pressing problem?
Societal collapse has been a recurrent phenomena throughout history. It is usually marked by state failure, political fragmentation, and the relatively rapid and ensuring loss of economic capital. For a future collapse, this could include the widespread and persistent loss of industrialisation. A potent mix of societal vulnerabilities, hazards such as pandemics and climate change, and poor responses could lead to a modern collapse. The global systems that many people rely on would fragment and fail. This could trigger severe suffering and losses of welfare.
How likely a collapse is, what are the key contributors, what the precise short-term and long-term impacts would be, and what policies can mitigate the risks of collapse are all important questions. These could all be illuminated through historical as well as forward-looking research.
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Research papers
Butzer, Karl (2012) Collapse, Environment, and Society, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Cumming, Graeme S. & Garry D. Peterson (2017) Unifying Research on Social–Ecological Resilience and Collapse, Trends in Ecology and Evolution
Denkenberger, David & Jeffrey Ladish (2019) Civilizational Collapse: Scenarios, Prevention, Responses (video)
Geddes, Barbara (1999) What Do We Know about Democratisation after Twenty Years, Annual Review of Political Science
Jebari, Karim (2021) Replaying History’s Tape: Convergent Cultural Evolution and the Prospects of Humanity after a Social Collapse
Kemp, Luke (2019) Are We On the Road to Civilisational Collapse?, BBC Future
Muelhauser, Luke, How Big a Deal Was the Industrial Revolution?
Books
Acemoglu, Daron & James Robinson (2012) Why Nations Fail, Crown Business
Caplan, Bryan (2008) The Totalitarian Threat, in Nick Bostrom (ed.), Global Catastrophic Risks, Oxford University Press
Cline, Eric (2014) 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, Princeton University Press
Diamond, Jared (2005) Collapse, Penguin
Levitsky, Steve & Daniel Ziblatt (2019) How Democracies Die, Penguin
McAnany, Patricia A. & Norman Yoffee (2009) Questioning Collapse, Cambridge University Press
Middleton, Guy (2017) Understanding Collapse: Ancient History and Modern Myths, Cambridge University Press
Scott, James C. (2017) Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, Yale University Press
Tainter, Joseph (1988) The Collapse of Complex Societies, Cambridge University Press
Organisations
PIIRS Global Systemic Risk, a research community at Princeton University
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Contributors: This profile was last updated 5/12/2022. Thanks to Luke Kemp for helpful feedback. All errors remain our own. Learn more about how we create our profiles.
