What makes societies resilient? What makes them susceptible to crisis? Can we learn from history how to steer our way towards more peaceful, equitable and prosperous outcomes? The overall goal of this workshop is to foster both existing and new collaborations between researchers studying crisis and resilience in a broad range of case studies, both historical and contemporary.

The workshop will take place at the end of the first year of a three-year research program, funded by FWF (the Austrian Science Fund). In this research, we study the dynamics of resilience and instability in human societies by combining novel historical and contemporary data with computational models of social dynamics. Ultimately, we aim to find out whether human societies can be considered as dynamical systems that are amenable to be studied with complexity science methods and how these results could help policymaking to increase the resilience of modern societies and avoid destructive instability.

Research questions include the following:

*What are the fundamental components of human group behavior that explain emergent, systemic outcomes, such as the stability, resilience or fragility of societies?

*What are the key similarities and differences in this regard between historical (pre-industrial) and contemporary societies?

*How accurately can models forecast future political instability in the coming decade?

The workshop structure will be a combination of:

*Talks by participants on case studies analyzing the dynamics of resilience and instability in a specific polity in the past, present, or future

*Discussion of the sources of quantitative data (including various proxies) allowing us to quantify resilience, instability and their predictors

*Discussion of the possibilities and limitations of developing and empirically testing theoretical explanations with broad applicability to different periods and types of societies.