Societies around the world seem to be constantly subjected to severe shocks, such as climate change, pandemics, (war-induced) dislocations of populations, supply chain disruptions, inflation, and recessions. Whether the result is a successful social adaptation or political strife, or in the worst case a social breakdown, depends on the degree of resilience of societies, i.e. their capacity for adaptive responses and effective collective action. In this research, we aim to assess the resilience of historic and modern societies and identify main factors that contribute to its breakdown, leading to instability and crisis. Whether human societies, and especially their resilience and instability, are amenable to quantitative analysis is a big, and still unresolved question, and our research will make a major step in answering this, along with deriving insights that will help modern societies to increase their resilience, mitigate instability and avoid crises.

We will utilize the tools of complexity science and build upon recent advances in political and social sciences to understand the factors that lead to sociopolitical unrest and breakdown, while clearly delineating the limits of such understanding. We will specifically aim to identify the fundamental components of human group behavior that explain emergent, systemic outcomes and thus can help identifying the factors that determine the resilience or stability of social arrangements. We will combine systemic and individual-level perspectives of human collective behavior in mathematical and statistical frameworks, and utilize the unique data collected and experience gained by our team over the past decade. In our research, we will take a broad historical viewpoint, and will focus on understanding the key similarities and differences between historical and modern societies. In this, we will evaluate the role of industrialization and deindustrialization, demographic transitions, changing gender roles, communication technologies and increased connectivity, along with the constraints presented by the environment. In our research, we will rely on unique data sources, including the vast amount of information contained in the Seshat Historical Databank, and its more specific extension that focuses specifically on crises in modern and historical contexts, CrisisDB. Models will be validated on this data and will then be used to assess resilience and instability in a set of contemporary societies.

Funding: The project is a Principial Investigator project funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).