A Theory of Societal Collapse: Convergent Shocks, Thermodynamic Disequilibrium, and Brittleness

Streaming video requires RealPlayer to view.The University Archives has determined that this item is of continuing value to OSU's history.Homer-Dixon’s most recent research has focused on threats to global security in the 21st century and on how societies adapt to complex economic, ecological, and technological change. His work is highly interdisciplinary, drawing on political science, economics, environmental studies, geography, cognitive science, social psychology, and complex systems theory.Ohio Wesleyan UniversityOhio State University. Mershon Center for International Security StudiesWebsite announcement; streaming video; PowerPoint presentation; photo

The environmental security debate and its significance for climate change

Policymakers, military strategists and academics all increasingly hail climate change as a security issue. This article revisits the (comparatively) long-standing “environmental security debate” and asks what lessons that earlier debate holds for the push towards making climate change a security issue. Two important claims are made. First, the emerging climate security debate is in many ways a re-run of the earlier dispute. It features many of the same proponents and many of the same disagreements. These disagreements concern, amongst other things, the nature of the threat, the referent object of security and the appropriate policy responses. Second, given its many different interpretations, from an environmentalist perspective, securitisation of the climate is not necessarily a positive development

Climate change and rising energy costs will change everything: A new mindset and action plan for 21st Century public health

Western governments currently prioritize economic growth and the pursuit of profit above alternative goals of sustainability, health and equality. Climate change and rising energy costs are challenging this consensus. The realization of the transformation required to meet these challenges has provoked denial and conflict, but could lead to a more positive response which leads to a health dividend; enhanced well-being, less overconsumption and greater equality. This paper argues that public health can make its best contribution by adopting a new mindset, discourse, methodology and set of tasks

Blackjack Players Demonstrate the Near Miss Effect

The effect of the ‘near-miss’ as a potential conditioned reinforcer in slot machine play has recently been the subject of behavioral research on gambling. The present study extends prior research by examining this effect during the game of blackjack. Participants consisted of college undergraduates with no history of problematic gambling. Their verbal ratings of closeness to winning were recorded and examined for each of 50 hands of standard blackjack per session. Results indicated that as the number difference between the dealer and player’s hands decreased, closeness to win rating increased. Also for each participant, non-bust losses were rated closer to winning than losses where the player busted

Cows and guns. Cattle-related conflict and armed violence in Fizi and Itombwe, eastern DR Congo

This paper analyses the role of cattle in the entwined dynamics of conflict and violence in the Fizi and Itombwe region of South Kivu province, in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. On the one hand, agropastoral conflict intensifies armed mobilisation, allowing armed groups to draw upon particular conflict narratives that generate popular and elite support. It also creates incentives for armed actors to engage in cattle-looting, or the defence against it, for both symbolic and material reasons. On the other hand, the presence of armed forces and the use of violence profoundly shape agropastoral conflicts. Importantly, they change the perceived stakes of these conflicts, and hamper their resolution. By showing that the relations between cattle-related conflict and armed activity are indirect, complex and mutual, the paper refines both theories on agropastoral conflict and those highlighting the role of local conflicts in fuelling violence in the eastern Congo

On preparing for the great gift of community that climate disasters can give us

There is a widespread (if rarely voiced) assumption, among those who dare to understand the future which climate chaos is likely to yield, that civility will give way and a Hobbesian war of all against all will be unleashed. Thankfully, this assumption is highly questionable. The field of ‘Disaster Studies’, as shown in Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell, makes clear that it is at least as likely that, tested in the crucible of back-to-back disasters, humanity will rise to the challenge, and we will find ourselves manifesting a truer humanity than we currently think ourselves to have. Thus the post-sustainability world will offer us a tremendous gift amidst the carnage. But how well we realise this gift depends on our preparing the way for it. In order to prepare, the fantasy of sustainable development needs to be jettisoned, along with the bargain-making mentality underpinning it. Instead, the inter-personal virtues of generosity, fraternity and care-taking need fostering. One role a philosophically informed deep reframing can play in this process of virtuous preparation for disaster is in helping people to understand that, in order to care for their children, they need to care for their children in turn, and so on, ad infinitum

Challenges and opportunities of human conflict and environmental transformation in Ecuadorian highlands

This article critically analyzes the relationships among resource scarcity, conflict, and the transformation of the environment, positing several conceptual tools that provide a nuanced explanation for environmental transformation through human conflict and which overcome some of the limitations of the existing literature of political conflict. After proposing the idea of nonlinear cycles of violent degradation and demonstrating empirically how this has transformed landscapes and societies in the Ecuadorian highlands, the article examines the sociopolitical processes that occur at each of the nodes of the cycle. Specifically, it argues that the political incentives for cooperative environmental management can build confidence and be instrumental in the de-escalation of violence related to natural resource conflicts. When cooperative environmental management and dispute resolution fails, it is frequently the result of a gap between the short-term political incentives for decision makers to intervene and craft institutional solutions and the long-term pay-offs of these institutional measures for their constituents. The article argues that the destructive cycle is not deterministic, and that at each of the nodes of the cycle, opportunities exist to reach a stage of constructive negotiation, either by building on technical cooperation, mobilizing external allies and pressure agents, or by equalizing the gap in political time windows through conflict escalation so that decision makers find it in their interest to engage and help manage the conflict and mitigate global change.Este artículo analiza críticamente las relaciones entre la escasez de recursos naturales, los conflictos, y la transformación del medio ambiente. Propone varias herramientas conceptuales que ofrecen una explicación detallada de la transformación ambiental por medio de los conflictos humanos y que superan algunas limitaciones de la literatura sobre los conflictos políticos. Después de proponer la idea de ciclos no-lineales de degradación violenta, y demostrar empíricamente cómo se han transformado los paisajes y sociedades de la Sierra ecuatoriana, el artículo examina los procesos sociopolíticos que ocurren en cada uno de los nodos del ciclo. Específicamente, sostiene que los incentivos políticos para el manejo cooperativo del medio ambiente pueden aumentar la confianza y pueden contribuir decisivamente a la disminución de la violencia que está relacionada a conflictos de recursos naturales. Cuando el manejo cooperativo del medio ambiente y la resolución de disputas fracasan, frecuentemente resulta un desequilibrio entre los incentivos políticos de corto plazo para intervenir con la creación de soluciones institucionales, y los beneficios de largo plazo que vienen de las medidas institucionales para su electorado. Este artículo sostiene que el ciclo destructivo no es determinista, y que en cada nodo del ciclo, existen oportunidades para lograr una negociación constructiva. Esta negociación puede resultar de cooperación técnica, de la movilización de aliados externos y agentes de presión, o de cambiar el desequilibrio en incentivos políticos por medio de un aumento del conflicto para hacer que los líderes políticos tengan interés en involucrarse para ayudar a manejar el conflicto y disminuir el impacto del cambio global

Unpacking cyberterrorism discourse: Specificity, status, and scale in news media constructions of threat

This article explores original empirical findings from a research project investigating representations of cyberterrorism in the international news media. Drawing on a sample of 535 items published by 31 outlets between 2008 and 2013, it focuses on four questions. First, how individuated a presence is cyberterrorism given within news media coverage? Second, how significant a threat is cyberterrorism deemed to pose? Third, how is the identity of ‘cyberterrorists’ portrayed? And, fourth, who or what is identified as the referent – that which is threatened – within this coverage? The article argues that constructions of specificity, status and scale play an important, yet hitherto under-explored, role within articulations of concern about the threat posed by cyberterrorism. Moreover, unpacking news coverage of cyberterrorism in this way leads to a more variegated picture than that of the vague and hyperbolic media discourse often identified by critics. The article concludes by pointing to several promising future research agendas to build on this work

Integal futures based on the paradigm approach

The study discusses the interpretation of integral futures in the context of paradigm. The dynamic matrix model of futures paradigm has been developed for carrying out meta-analysis of futures. As a result of meta-analysis integral futures and its new paradigms are defined by way of reconstructing futures paradigm history as responses to changing societal needs and through the outcomes of dynamic and comparative analysis of futures paradigms. The study sets the argument that integral futures: a) is entering a new phase in development of futures that responses to societal demands for sustainability, democratic participation and continuous knowledge production and integration, b) it is the phase of cooperation building between theoretical and practical futures, c) it is the complementary development of co-evolutionary and participatory paradigms, d) it unfolds further research perspectives for futures

Environmental changes and violent conflict

This letter reviews the scientific literature on whether and how environmental changes affect the risk of violent conflict. The available evidence from qualitative case studies indicates that environmental stress can contribute to violent conflict in some specific cases. Results from quantitative large-N studies, however, strongly suggest that we should be careful in drawing general conclusions. Those large-N studies that we regard as the most sophisticated ones obtain results that are not robust to alternative model specifications and, thus, have been debated. This suggests that environmental changes may, under specific circumstances, increase the risk of violent conflict, but not necessarily in a systematic way and unconditionally. Hence there is, to date, no scientific consensus on the impact of environmental changes on violent conflict. This letter also highlights the most important challenges for further research on the subject. One of the key issues is that the effects of environmental changes on violent conflict are likely to be contingent on a set of economic and political conditions that determine adaptation capacity. In the authors' view, the most important indirect effects are likely to lead from environmental changes via economic performance and migration to violent conflict. © 2012 IOP Publishing Ltd