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1. Introduction the definition and framings of existential risk¶ In recent years, a growing body of scholarship has argued that a new class of risks bears closer study, for their potential extreme impact on the survival of humanity (Bostrom, 2002, 2013; Bostrom & Cirkovic, 2011; Matheny, 2007; Rees, 2004). Prior research has identified a range of such human extinction risks (Bostrom & Cirkovic, 2008; Haggstrom, 2016; Pamlin & Armstrong, 2015), both natural and manmade, including risks from supervolcano eruption, asteroid impact, global warming, nuclear war, as well as more speculative risks from emerging technologies such as biotechnology, high-energy physics experiment disasters, or misaligned artificial intelligence. (Asimov, 1981; Baum & Barrett, 2016; Bostrom, 2014; Ord, Hillerbrand, & Sandberg, 2010; Posner, 2004; Sagan, 1983; Smil, 2005; Tegmark & Bostrom, 2005; Yudkowsky, 2008a).¶ While it is encouraging to see greater attention for a critical topic that has long remained understudied, it is relevant to ask how the framing of the field’s basic concepts shapes both which problems it identifies and prioritizes, as well as which policy approaches it considers and engages. In his seminal paper, Bostrom defined an existential risk as ‘[o]ne where an adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential’ (Bostrom, 2002). Thus in Bostrom’s view, existential risks are characterised both by their scope (pan-generational) and their intensity (crushing): the size of the group of people who are at risk1 and how badly each individual within that group is affected, respectively (Bostrom, 2002).¶ Much prior research on existential risks has thus deployed criteria and methodology which have identified discrete and independent challenges of sufficient severity and pervasiveness to bring about the ‘adverse outcome’ in a direct causal manner. In this reading, existential risks are an extreme offshoot of global catastrophic risks—disasters which “might have the potential to inflict serious damage to human well-being on a global scale” (Bostrom, 2013; Bostrom & Cirkovic, 2011, p. 2), but which fall short of permanent collapse. While we are not necessarily averse to the Bostromian definition of ‘adverse outcomes’—a definition which indeed seems to characterize the space of eventual outcomes to be avoided—we take more issue with the limited range of pathways towards this dreaded outcome-space, which much of the literature has focused on exploring. Specifically, as noted by others in the community, much prior research “has focused mainly on tracing a causal pathway from a catastrophic event to global catastrophic loss of life” (Avin et al., 2018, p. 1). As such there remains an event-focus, in the sense that only discrete events that are causally connected to the demise of humanity within a relatively short time-frame qualify as an existential risk (rather than a ‘merely’ globally catastrophic one, or a background risk).¶ 1.1. Existential risk (re)framings as crucial consideration for law & governance approaches¶ Distinguishing existential risks as a uniquely threatening outlier along the spectrum of global risks, however, is arguably an unnecessarily narrow framing of the field of study. Indeed, a high-profile ‘one-hit-KO’ existential risk such as a global nuclear war or a pandemic may constitute only one avenue towards that ‘adverse outcome’, and concentrating predominately upon (ways to intervene in) its origin and direct pathway, risks overshadowing other potential paths or disaster interaction effects2 that functionally converge towards that same disastrous outcome, even if only indirectly or over longer timescales, with a potentially higher probability. Indeed, as recently noted by scholars in the field, a full mapping of scenarios that lead to catastrophic outcomes “requires exploring the interplay between many interacting critical systems and threats, beyond the narrow study of individual scenarios that are typically addressed by single disciplines” (Avin et al., 2018, p. 2).The precise framing of ‘existential risks’ is therefore a crucial consideration, informing ethical, strategic, and epistemological (cf. academic) priorities in facing ‘adverse outcomes’. This is particularly the case in the context of studying how global political dynamics may interact with certain existential risks, and in formulating meaningfully effective policies and governance approaches to such risks. Of course, this is not to say that the field of existential risk studies has not sought to involve and engage with policy and governance approaches and solutions. Indeed, to its credit, research in the field of existential risks has actively sought to engage with these issues—given that, as Bostrom himself observes (2013:27), global cooperation is critical to mitigating a wide range of existential risks. Likewise, researchers within the ‘AI safety’ community are beginning to highlight fields such as policy and psychology, as under-represented but potentially promising approaches to addressing risks arising from AI (Brundage, 2017; Sotala, 2017b).¶ Accordingly, there has been research into the interaction effects between technologies and politics—such as the possibility that arms races might increase the risk that untested, powerful AI systems are deployed rashly or prematurely (Armstrong, Bostrom, & Shulman, 2013; Shulman, 2009). Other work has drawn on cognitive psychology, to study how people might structurally (mis)judge the probability of risks (Yudkowsky, 2008b). Likewise, work exploring policy- and governance approaches to mitigating existential risks has explored policy approaches that include insurance arrangements for large catastrophes (Taylor, 2008); technology taxes and subsidies (Posner, 2008); and work drawing on social (and organizational) psychology to assess ways to motivate AI researchers to choose beneficial AI designs (Baum, 2016). Yet, other work has examined the cost-effectiveness of biosecurity interventions (Millett & Snyder-Beattie, 2017); pricing externalities to balance public the risks and benefits of scientific research generally (Farquhar, Cotton-Barratt, & Snyder-Beattie, 2017); and proposing a general international regulatory regime to govern global catastrophic and existential risks from emerging technologies (Wilson, 2013). At present, a majority of existential risk research centres3 have articulated law and policy research as areas of interest, and scholars in this space have begun to translate such work into concrete proposed policy interventions—notably the 2017 GPP report, which included proposals to develop governance for geoengineering research; establish international scenario plans and exercises for engineered pandemics, and build international attention for existential risk reduction (Farquhar, Halstead et al., 2017).¶ Such work is highly encouraging, and the existential risk research agenda has benefited from it. Nonetheless, the risk remains that a too-narrow conception of ‘existential risks’ prematurely closes down the space of law and governance solutions that are possible—or necessary—in assuring humanity a non-catastrophic future—for instance, a future that, in Bostrom’s framing, meaningfully ‘maximize[s] the probability of an ok outcome’ (Bostrom, 2013, p. 19). However, if human extinction and the persistent and pervasive truncation of technological potential are not completely homologous, then tailoring our portfolio of policy responses exclusively to closing off the pathways these risks could take—and then calling it a day—would be insufficient. In fact, this might only afford future policymakers with a false sense of security, even as the world continues to reside in an overall state of ‘super-risk’ (Bermudez & Pardo, 2015).¶ This is especially the case when there is a narrow ‘technological’ (re)solution on offer—such as ‘improve global vaccine synthesis and production capability’, or ‘subsidize international technical AI safety research’—which promise to address or prevent the risk at its root. While such direct technological solutions may certainly be indispensable to averting some existential risks, they may not suffice in actually ‘plugging all the holes’ in our risk space. In a disciplinary context, there is a risk (admittedly self-correcting, given publication incentives) of the research agenda ‘halting’ early. In a real-world context, the availability of simple, straightforward ‘fixes’ might even pose a ‘moral hazard’, if policymakers or global governance systems which lack political will or the attention to explore more complex or costly changes, seize upon the ‘symbolic action’ of the straightforward, first-order mitigation strategies. Even where this is not the case, certain policy recommendations to mitigate existential risks might depend on too-optimistic a view of institutional rationality or capability.¶ 1.2. ‘Boring Apocalypses’: from existential hazards, to existential risks¶ While such efforts might mitigate specific existential risks, this might not translate into significantly lowering the overall probability of the ‘adverse outcome’, if only a part of the problem, or only one problem among many, is addressed. An alternative articulation is that only one path to the ‘adverse outcome’ is being explored by much research into existential risks: erecting obstacles along that path may indeed reduce the overall likelihood of manifesting these risks, but this might have little impact, or even no effect, upon the manifestation of the ‘adverse outcome’.¶ Thus, our view is that a materialised existential risk (what we call an ‘existential hazard’) is sufficient to lead to an (existentially) ‘adverse outcome’, but crucially, that this is unnecessary to reach that result. If the overarching objective is to lower the probability of human extinction or significant technological curtailment, adopting an array of approaches which complement the mitigation of direct existential risks are required. Within this broad spectrum of aligned approaches, we propose to introduce law, policy, regulatory and governance tools in this paper as an example. The choice of law and policy perspectives is two-fold: on one hand, they make it possible to take second-order considerations, which involve indirect and socially and culturally mediated paths towards ‘adverse outcomes’ into account; on the other hand, these recognise both the complexity of social organisation and the prospect that civilizational collapse may trigger or possibly instantiate existential outcomes. In this sense, law and policy approaches offer the possibility of complementing and enhancing the narrower approach adopted by contemporary existential risk research, to take into consideration other paths to existentially adverse outcomes; and to better anticipate vulnerabilities, exposures and failure modes in societal efforts to address existential risks.¶ 1.3. Exploring the implications of the existential risk framing: risks from AI¶ An example of this can be drawn from the prospect of super intelligent artificial intelligence (Bostrom, 2014; Yudkowsky, 2008a). Although the landmark research agenda articulated by Russell, Dewey, and Tegmark (2015) does call for research into ‘short-term’ policy issues, debates in this field of AI risk4 have—with some exceptions—identified the core problem as one of value alignment, where the divergence between the interests of humanity and those of the superintelligence would lead to the demise of humanity through mere processes of optimisation. Thus, the existential risk posed by the superintelligence lies in the fact that it will be more capable than we can ever be; human beings will be outmanoeuvred in attempts at convincing, controlling or coercing that superintelligence to serve our interests. As a result of this framing, the research agenda on AI risk has put the emphasis on evaluating the technical feasibility of an ‘intelligence explosion’ (Chalmers, 2010; Good, 1964) through recursive self-improvement after reaching a critical threshold (Bostrom, 2014; Sotala, 2017a; Yudkowsky, 2008a, Yudkowsky, 2013)5; on formulating strategies to estimate timelines for the expected technological development of such ‘human-level’ or ‘general’ machine intelligence (Armstrong and Sotala, 2012, Armstrong and Sotala, 2015; Baum, Goertzel, & Goertzel, 2011; Brundage, 2015; Grace, Salvatier, Dafoe, Zhang, & Evans, 2017; Müller & Bostrom, 2016); and on formulating technical proposals to guarantee that a superintelligence’s goals or values will remain aligned with those of humanity—the so-called superintelligence ‘Control Problem’ (Armstrong, Sandberg, & Bostrom, 2012; Bostrom, 2012, Bostrom, 2014; Goertzel & Pitt, 2014; Yudkowsky, 2008a).6¶ While this is worthwhile and necessary to address the potential risks of advanced AI, this framing of existential risks focuses on the most direct and causally connected existential risk posed by AI systems. Yet while super-human intelligence might surely suffice to trigger an existential outcome, it is not necessary to it. Cynically, mere human level intelligence appears to be more than sufficient to pose an array of existential risks (Martin, 2006; Rees, 2004).¶ Furthermore, some applications of ‘narrow’ AI which might help in mitigating against some existential risks, might pose their own existential risks when combined with other technologies or trends, or might simply lower barriers against other varieties of existential risks. To give one example; the deployment of advanced AI-enhanced surveillance capabilities7—including automatic hacking, geospatial sensing, advanced data analysis capabilities, and autonomous drone deployment—may greatly strengthen global efforts to protect against ‘rogue’ actors engineering a pandemic (“preventing existential risk”). It may also offer very accurate targeting and repression information to a totalitarian regimes,8 particularly those with separate access to nanotechnological weapons (“creating a new existential risk”). Finally, the increased strategic transparency of such AI systems might disrupt existing nuclear deterrence stability, by rendering vulnerable previously ‘secure’ strategic assets (“lowering the threshold to existential risk”) (Hambling, 2016; Holmes, 2016; Lieber & Press, 2017).¶ Finally, many ‘non-catastrophic’ trends engendered by AI—whether geopolitical disruption, unemployment through automation; widespread automated cyberattacks, or computational propaganda—might resonate to instil a deep technological anxiety or regulatory distrust in global public. While these trends do not directly lead to catastrophe, they could well be understood as a meta-level existential threat, if they spur rushed and counter-productive regulation at the domestic level, or so degrade conditions for cooperation on the international level that they curtail our collective ability to address not just existential risks deriving from artificial intelligence, but those from other sources (e.g. synthetic biology and climate change), as well.¶ These brief examples sketch out the broader existential challenges latent within AI research and development at preceding stages or manifesting through different avenues than the signature risk posed by superintelligence. Thus, addressing the existential risk posed by superintelligence is both crucial to avoiding the ‘adverse outcome’, but simultaneously misses the mark in an important sense.¶ 2. Re-examining existential risks: hazard, vulnerability, and exposure¶ While Bostrom’s leading typology identifies the general area inhabited by existential risks, it provides little guidance for how to differentiate among the diverse risks within that category (the box marked ‘X’), because these risks are not distinguished according to their source, characteristics, or complexity, but only their impact (“crushing”) and scope (“pan-generational”).9¶ However, given the range of distinct risks falling within the ‘X’ box—that is, risks that could cause or feed into an eventual terminal and crushing ‘adverse outcome’ for humanity—we suggest it relevant to deconstruct existential risks, and instead consider the broader category of ‘risks as a function of hazard, vulnerability and exposure’10,11:¶ Existential Risk = Hazard* Vulnerability * Exposure¶ Here, hazard denotes the external source of peril (which is captured within the prevailing agenda studying existential risks)—the ‘spark’ that threatens the pan-generational/crushing harm.¶ Vulnerability denotes propensities or weaknesses inherent within human social, political, economic or legal systems, that increase the likelihood of humanity succumbing to pressures or challenges that threaten existential outcomes.¶ Finally, exposure denotes the ‘reaction surface’—the number, scope and nature of the interface between the hazard and the vulnerability.¶ Thus, a hazard is what kills us, and a vulnerability is how we die. Exposure is the interface or medium between what kills us, and how we die. To take an example from disaster studies, a major earthquake only becomes a risk if the built, social or institutional environment can be destabilised during earthquakes of the threatened magnitude (“is vulnerable to”), and if such an environment is located in (“exposed to”) an earthquake zone. Thus, vulnerability and exposure refer to two different aspects of the affected system: how it breaks, and how it intersects with a given hazard’s operating space or pathways of impact (Fig. 1).¶ As a species of global catastrophic risks, the study of existential risks is often conflated with, and perhaps even collapsed into, the identification and mitigation of existential hazards. Where attention is paid to issues of vulnerability and exposure, these are often identified in light of an existential hazard. One of the leading sources and reference points in the field symptomatically organizes the field as a collection of existential hazards (Bostrom & Cirkovic, 2008). A caveat applies for a small subset of hazards of such enormous magnitude that it renders mitigation strategies focussing upon vulnerability and exposure less relevant, or perhaps even irrelevant. The paragon might be the scenarios of ‘simulation collapse’, or a high-energy physics experiment going awry, altering the astronomical vicinity and rendering life untenable (Ord et al., 2010). Such extreme hazards constitute the archetype of existential risks as a subset of global catastrophic risks and can only be addressed by managing the hazard head-on, with vulnerability and exposure components relegated to marginal roles:¶ Existential Risk = Existential Hazard * Vulnerability * Exposure¶ Thus, our claim is not that the field of existential risks research is looking in the wrong places—the emphasis on existential risks has enabled this field to identify a core group of existential hazards which would on their own suffice to bring about the ‘existentially adverse outcome’.¶ Nonetheless, there are also many other, slower and more intertwined ways in which the world might collapse, without being hit by spectacular hazards. To complement the study of existential risks we can draw upon lessons learnt through historical and anthropological studies of civilizational collapse. Thus, while existential risks concentrate upon clear-cut existential hazards, civilizational collapse research infers influential factors that were involved in trajectories of decline. These studies are beginning to challenge the traditional conceptual framework which set out a cyclical history, wherein a civilisations rise and fall, progressing through a predictable pattern of growth, zenith and decline in a gradual manner (Ferguson, 2011). In other words, historically civilizational collapses are boring. Diamond refined this model by recognising that civilizational collapse could be a slow and protracted process emerging from complex interactions (Diamond, 2006).¶ 3. Beyond hazards: vulnerability and exposure¶ In this paper, we set out to foreground the other two variables involved in the existential risk equation.¶ Thus, as noted, ‘vulnerability’ denotes propensities or weaknesses inherent within human social, political, economic or legal systems that increase the likelihood of humanity succumbing to pressures or challenges that threaten existential outcomes.¶ ‘Exposure’ indicates the nexus between external hazards and internal vulnerabilities: the interface at which the ‘adverse outcome’ precipitates from their interaction. Historical studies of civilizational collapses indicate that even small exogenous shocks can destabilise a vulnerable system (Diamond, 2006; Ferguson, 2011). Given this, studying ‘exposure’ is relevant in systematically analysing interaction effects: a cataclysmic hazard interacting with robust and resilient human systems may be survivable, but conversely, at the interstices at which our human technology, institutions or culture are most vulnerable, even minor (initially ‘non-catastrophic’) hazards can be the inflection point that tips these susceptible systems towards trajectories of collapse (Gladwell, 2001).12¶ In order to offset the tight coupling between existential risks and existential hazards, we will further dissect the vulnerability and exposure factors introduced in the existential risk calculus. Our proposed taxonomy distinguishes four general categories of vulnerability and exposure (see Table 1).¶ •Ontological: vulnerability through existing in a given location and time in our universe13;¶ •Passive: vulnerability through lack of action; ‘indirect’ exposure;¶ •Active: vulnerability because of insufficient/mis-specified action.¶ •Intentional: vulnerability or exposure knowingly maintained, for that purpose.¶ Note that for vulnerability, the Passive, Active and Intentional categories correspond to the jurisprudential concepts of ‘omission’ (‘failure to act’), ‘negligence’ (action, but with failure to exercise the appropriate care to prevent foreseeable future harm) and ‘intention’ (action with the known purpose to bring about a consequence).¶ Drawing such distinctions offers the opportunity to be more precise about the features or characteristics which give rise to the existential dimension of the challenge, and thus suggest specific points for targeted intervention, as well as potential failure modes to caution against.¶ Below, we combine these categories and their sub-divisions, in twin taxonomies of existential ‘vulnerabilities’ and ‘exposure’. We also seek to give concrete examples. Obviously, not all of these examples are currently unstudied—indeed many feature prominently in the existing literature—though in other cases they remain understudied. While this list is naturally not comprehensive, we hope that such examples enable researchers in the field of existential risks to locate their research in an overarching framework, as well as facilitating links to established scholarly fields which have studied given issues, without considering their bearing on larger existential risks.¶ 3.1. A taxonomy of ‘existential vulnerability’¶ Our proposed taxonomy for distinguishing between different manifestations of existential vulnerabilities is summarised in Table 2: note that the salience or tractability of these existential vulnerabilities to law and policy approaches increases as one goes down: ontological vulnerabilities appear (at present) highly intractable to mere law and policy—it would be a vain regulator indeed who would try to legislate against physical laws. However, as one proceeds to passive, active, or intended vulnerabilities, the salience of governance approaches increases (Table 3).¶ 3.1.1. Ontological vulnerability¶ The category of ontological vulnerability denotes intrinsic vulnerabilities associated with human existence. These include the possibility that we inhabit a computer simulation (Bostrom, 2002), which might be terminated or altered at any time. More conceptual and basic vulnerabilities—so fundamental that we often would not even consider them as such—include our existence as biological beings that are dependent (potentially more so than other species such as tardigrades) on continuous or relatively uninterrupted inputs of energy & resources (such as food, water, air, light, …), which renders the human species one comparatively vulnerable to ‘extinction’ events such as a supervolcano- or meteor-induced global winter. On a deeper level yet, all biochemistry is dependent on the existing laws of physics within which it evolved, rendering us acutely and terminally vulnerable to any processes (e.g. vacuum decay) which would profoundly alter these processes. Biological deterioration due to aging processes, or exterior damages, might also rank amongst these, although that is conditional on whether or not there exists a physical ‘hard ceiling’ to how far medical senescence research might extend human lifespans and reduce other vulnerabilities.¶ As these are background conditions at the frontiers of epistemology, we are unlikely to be able to unveil more than a fraction of these vulnerabilities. Also, as inherent features of human existence we have limited abilities to act effectively in this category. Perhaps the most utility we can extract from delimiting ontological vulnerability is to restrict its reach: in other words to leave this as a residual class of vulnerabilities inherent in existence.¶ 3.1.2. Vulnerabilities, passive and active; built, institutional and cultural¶ Passive vulnerabilities are characterised by inaction: the susceptibility to existential outcomes by virtue of failure to take appropriate measures. Conversely, active vulnerabilities arise in association with human activities, as by-products or unintended consequences.¶ Three cross-cutting sub-distinctions can also be made for both passive and active vulnerabilities: built, cultural, and institutional.¶ Built vulnerabilities are characterised by our (passive) failure to put into place relevant solutions or defences to existential challenges, or by our (active) failure to repair or correct the extant vulnerabilities in the legacy infrastructures we deploy, or the path-dependent ways we deploy them—even if we have such solutions or repairs at our disposal. Such solutions can in fact include some interventions proposed by the existential risk research agenda, such as an asteroid defence programme or the ability to systematically monitor for supervolcano eruptions (Denkenberger & Blair, 2018); they also cover the active existential risks posed by the technologies which humanity has introduced, but which go unfixed—such as architectural deficiencies creating intractable cybersecurity vulnerabilities in universally used computing chips. Because of the technical nature of engineered vulnerabilities, some of these are perhaps closest to the existing (policy) research agenda of the existential risk community—and at present some may consider that law and policy tools have less of a role to play, other than to coordinate efforts aimed at addressing them.¶ In contrast, top-down vulnerabilities resulting from suboptimal direction and coordination are captured by our sub-category of institutional vulnerability. Here, the line between active and passive is admittedly thin, where recklessness can be the distinguishing feature. Active institutional vulnerability may be characterised by failure to coordinate to address a known risk, such as climate change, or cyclical global economic melt-down. Passive institutional vulnerability may then be understood as directional and coordination failures that limit the scope of knowledge related to existential risks—perhaps an implicit ‘unwillingness to know’, which translates in an unwillingness to fund blue-sky research into charting ‘unknown unknowns’ (Rumsfeld, 2002).¶ Cultural vulnerability encompass the bottom-up societal dimensions, reflecting how certain social practices may affect susceptibility to existential challenges. Active cultural vulnerabilities include customary practices that facilitate the spread of pathogens, increasing susceptibility to pandemics, for example integrated commercial travel networks and interpersonal greeting rituals which encourage physical proximity or contact. Passive cultural vulnerabilities include the exclusion or ridicule of existential risks from serious discussion in public forums (let alone the halls of power). This increases collective vulnerabilities insofar as the public and policymakers underrate the prospects for existential risks (cognitive biases exacerbate these effects, Kahneman, 2012) resulting in further marginalisation.¶ 3.1.3. Intended vulnerabilities¶ Intended vulnerabilities are those which are created or retained specifically for that purpose, and within the existing research agenda are reflected in the premises of the ‘AI risk’ or ‘Apocalyptic AI’ movement (Geraci, 2010). Another salient example can, however, be found in nuclear force postures which (in the US context) features centralization of launch command authority along with a ‘launch-on-warning’ doctrine that relies on input from fallible early launch warning systems (Borrie, 2014; Sagan, 1993). Together, this gives rise to the catastrophic risk of an accidental nuclear war (Barrett, Baum, & Hostetler, 2013). Yet far from incidental, this is arguably by design. As the theorist Kenneth Boulding once observed: “if [deterrence] were really stable … it would cease to deter. If the probability of nuclear weapons going off were zero, they would not deter anybody” (Boulding, 1986, p. 32).14 The nuclear force knowingly renders itself more vulnerable to catastrophic accidents—sacrificing a degree of safety for the sake of strengthening operational readiness and deterrence. While less dramatic, similar intentional vulnerabilities could emerge from a state intelligence service knowingly holding back-doors or ‘zero-day-exploits’ which it identifies in critical infrastructure software, in the hope that this may enable more effective cyberattacks against rival states at a later state.¶ 3.1.4. Existential vulnerability: mitigation and adaptation strategies¶ This taxonomy of vulnerabilities can provide concrete suggestions for addressing existential risks. While the categories of ontological and intended vulnerabilities may seem superfluous, their treatment as additional classes allow limited resources to be concentrated into the most tractable areas. Perhaps the main contribution of this taxonomy is to highlight how existential risks need not be active and discernible, in the manner of the ‘hazards’ identified in the field. Instead, many of these risks can be latent, and slow-moving. Moreover, this taxonomy aids in understanding how human activities can impact paths towards ‘existential outcomes’ in several ways: (1) intent: by directly creating technologies which pose existential hazards (i.e. emerging technologies such as AI, nanotechnology and synthetic biology); (2) (negligence) by establishing complex systems for which failure is unavoidable (Perrow, 2011); (3) and by omission, the failure to take steps to confront existential risks.¶ Beyond merely refining the sources of existential risks, the contribution of this taxonomy lies in creating a roadmap for the study and integration of risks that have not yet received much or consistent attention in the field of existential risks. In doing so, we emphasise a number of existential vulnerabilities, such as global dependency upon a few species of staple crops, or certain types of globalised technologies (e.g. SCADA-based systems in critical infrastructure) that are not commonly recognised as sources or failure points of existential risks.¶ The study of existential ‘vulnerability’ may suggest that adaptation strategies are preferable to those of mitigation, both because of the inherent complexity underlying both forms of structural vulnerability and because adaptation can now occur simultaneously with mitigation. This is because the vulnerability analysis in effect opens up a parallel system where other trajectories of existential risks are at play. The rough equivalence drawn between traditional existential risks with existential hazards might have the effect of underselling adaptation strategies: it is illogical to conceive of robustness as a defence against the apocalypse, after all. Along with efforts to mitigate or avert existential hazards, however, we can now also plan for adaptation against vulnerabilities. Thus, adaptation strategies are not limited to actions undertaken after ‘the Fall’: instead they may become rational reactions towards limiting susceptibility to existential risks. In order to explore this potential further, we proceed to examine a taxonomy of exposure.¶ 3.2. A taxonomy of ‘Existential exposure’¶ As a parallel effort to our taxonomy on existential vulnerabilities, we set out a classification system to differentiate between different forms of exposure. It is worth recalling at this point that we use exposure to express the interface between hazards and vulnerabilities—between what kills us, and how we die. Both hazards and vulnerabilities in isolation remain as potentials: exposure is thus a means of actualising such potential into existential risks.¶ Such exposure can further be directed towards either the societal or the natural environment. This is about what is directly at risk: our (human) society and the common capabilities and support structures preventing existential risks; or nature and its carrying capacity and resilience to future shocks. Thus, we assert that devastating results for humankind can follow from the collapse of both the societal structures we have built, as well as the natural environments within which these constructed systems are embedded. Again, the distinction allows us to single out different examples and trajectories to build alternative strategies for human survival. As is clear from the examples above, it also draws out lessons for existential outcomes which might not be immediately evident from an analysis of existential hazards alone. For example, when ‘exposure’ is seen from the perspective of the natural environment on which mankind depends, pervasive over-fishing and deforestation, combined with trends in resource demands tracking population growth, may become potentially hazardous activities with the potential to curtail human development in the long run (Diamond, 2006), even if they do not affect most humans directly in the short run.¶ 3.2.1. Ontological exposure¶ Some exposures are inherent in residing on Earth. Those falling in the category of natural exposure denote existence on earth itself as the exposure, and include our exposure to Near-Earth Objects (NEO) hitting earth or supervolcanoes triggering a protracted volcanic winter. The common denominator underlying this form of exposure is their requirement for measures beyond our present technological capacity to overcome (which admittedly, can be a moving threshold).¶ 3.2.2. Indirect and direct exposure¶ As with the discussion of existential vulnerabilities set out above, the potential of our proposed taxonomy lies in the analysis of indirect and direct exposures. This distinction identifies the exposures that are a direct consequence of human activity, from those that are caused by more complex interactions with other systems.¶ The theoretical example of high-energy physics research going awry15 provides an example of societal exposure.16 A final example of direct exposures are private or unilateral attempts to undertake ‘Active SETI’—alternately called METI (‘Messaging to Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence’) (Zaitsev, 2006)—which might expose the rest of mankind to catastrophic risk, should any future contacted alien species prove hostile and capable of interstellar-scale interdiction. These examples illustrate how surfaces of direct exposure (and ways to reduce it) might be overlooked when concentrating upon the hazard alone.¶ Beyond direct exposures, an array of arrangements which jeopardise the human societies that have become dependent on them. This category includes any activity or arrangement which might expose the world to extinction through cascading effects. The development of critical common global infrastructures such as the internet, energy markets, and cultural and scientific harmonization might be classified as exposures, rather than vulnerabilities because these reveal new interfaces between hazards and vulnerabilities. Thus collapse of common infrastructures would trigger cascades which jeopardise civilizational sophistication at the global level (Wright, 2006), the edifice upon which humanity’s long-term potential has been built. Similarly, developments like urbanisation, intensification of agriculture, and even increasing global inequality () appear to be factors that create fault lines and further drive exposures to existential vulnerabilities. Here the exposure perspective shows us that only by certain actions or inactions do risks actually materialise fully against civilization.¶ 3.2.3. Intentional exposure¶ Finally, some of these exposures appear to exist intentionally, or at least knowingly or recklessly. The city of New Orleans, Louisiana, provides a microcosm of how dysfunctional behaviour, seen from an existential risk perspective, might be driven by human incentives or rationales operating at different orders. The city is, in design and position, incredibly vulnerable to its natural environment—pinched in between the Mexican Gulf and Lake Pontchartrain and built on the banks of the Mississippi River. Accordingly, some have argued that the most reasonable strategy following hurricane Katrina would have been to abandon the city permanently (Richards, 2011). Instead, the affected populations were given incentives to return, with the US government investing billions in the reconstruction of the city, aware that even with improved defences, the city remains unsafe (Cutter et al., 2014).¶ Similarly, many populations worldwide, from Tehran and Kathmandu, to San Francisco and Port-au-Prince, persist in known disaster-prone zones, for (legitimate) reasons of culture, history, identity or economy. The purpose of these examples is not to warn the populations of these cities, nor to judge their decision to remain: rather the point is that individuals and societies often make decisions based upon entirely different rationales than a concern for survival. This is an insight that seems to scale to any level of government. In simpler terms, sometimes we choose exposure over safety because of competing considerations, and while this might be productive from a cultural heritage perspective, it remains problematic when seen through the lens of existential risks.¶ 4. Are existential hazards necessary for existential risks?¶ Having set out taxonomies for differentiating between factors which influence existential risks the question remains whether all components are necessary to bring about an ‘adverse outcome’. Our initial claim was that existential hazards could be sufficient existential risks, but that they were not necessary to pose such risks.¶ Returning to the civilization collapse literature cited above, Ferguson provides a critical insight in contesting the traditional view of cyclical history itself. He posits an alternative conceptual framework by asking the question: ‘What if history is not cyclical and slow-moving, but arrhythmic?’ (Ferguson, 2011, p. 299). Continuing, he summarises the perspective we adopt succinctly:¶ Civilisations… are highly complex systems, made up of a very large number of interacting components that are asymmetrically organised, so that their construction more closely resembles a Namibian termite mound than an Egyptian pyramid. They operate somewhere between order and disorder − on ‘the edge of chaos’, in the phrase of computer scientist Christopher Langton. Such systems can appear to operate quite stably for some time, apparently in equilibrium, in reality constantly adapting. But there comes a moment when they “go critical”. A slight perturbation can set off a “phase transition” from a benign equilibrium to a crisis − a single grain of sand causes an apparently stable sandcastle to fall in on itself. (Ferguson, 2011, pp. 299–300).¶ Wright echoes this sentiment: ‘Civilisations often fall quite suddenly − the House of Cards effect − because as they reach full demand on their ecologies, they become highly vulnerable to natural fluctuations’ (Wright, 2006, p. 130). When combined with the observation that hitherto isolated civilizational experiments have now been merged (Harari, 2015), this raises the spectre that existential risks can coalesce from factors that historically brought about only limited civilizational collapses. Thus, the question we need to pose in this regard is whether vulnerabilities themselves contain the seeds of existential risks?¶ In this context, we should note that vulnerabilities have often been considered mostly as aggravating factors. As aggravators then, vulnerabilities are subsidiary considerations restricted to influencing borderline events: where a potential existential hazard impacts humanity, its susceptibility or resilience could determine whether or not that hazard was transmuted into an existential outcome.¶ In line with vulnerabilities being developed as a separate sphere where existential risks are at play, this section explores the possibility of removing the existential character of the hazard and thus plausibly reducing the calculus to:¶ Existential Risk = Hazard * Existential Vulnerability * Exposure¶ [and/or]¶ Existential Risk = Hazard * Vulnerability * Existential Exposure¶ An initial issue is that a catalyst of some sort is required to precipitate the existential risk, because even a system with well-exposed inherent susceptibilities will need something to set it motion. Removing the existential hazard component allows us to explore the possibility that relatively minor occurrences can trigger cascades that emerge as existential risks. But a vulnerability cannot by definition transmute into the existential risk itself absent external input: for this reason we diminish the stature of ‘hazard’ in the equation to represent our proposition that exogenous shocks need not be the spectacular existential hazards recognised by the study of existential risks. Instead, the external hazards in our revised equation can include insignificant events which go unnoticed (and quite probably involve a large number of minor occurrences).¶ 5. Contributions and limitations of law and policy tools for existential risks¶ While our deconstruction of existential risks lead to fairly broad claims, it also provides a few concrete questions and insights. First and foremost, if existential risks can indeed be triggered by non-existential hazards, we need to broaden the scope of investigation in order to draw a more accurate roadmap of the existential risks field, one which can deal with questions of vulnerability and exposure explicitly.¶ Second, the type of perceived challenge channels the range of appropriate responses which can be developed. While existential hazards may appropriately be met by narrower forms of technical solutions and technologically-oriented mitigation strategies, our broader perspective of existential risks open up other toolboxes to confront existential risks. In particular, social vulnerability and human-driven (anthropogenic) exposure require improved governance and coordination for adaptation strategies. Thus, when we reconstruct existential hazards through the optics of the social systems’ inability to withstand them they, per definition, become social phenomena. As noted, many existential risk scholars have recently recognised the importance of reaching out to, and incorporating, law and governance approaches, even where the origin of the existential hazard itself is technological. The critical role of such law and governance approaches should be even more self-evident where the problems in question—the origins of existential vulnerability and exposure—are themselves social, not technological.

Everything, for example, has now become possible. But what human being seems most impelled to do with the power of its actions is to turn itself into a species; not merely an animal species, nor even a species of currency or consumption (which amount to the same thing), but a mere species of calculation. For only by reducing itself to an index of calculation does it seem capable of constructing that political arithmetic by which it can secure the security globalised Western thought insists upon, and which a world made increasingly unpredictable by the very way human being acts into it now seems to require. Yet, the very rage for calculability which securing security incites is precisely also what reduces human freedom, inducing either despair or the surrender of what is human to the de-humanising calculative logic of what seems to be necessary to secure security. I think, then, that Hannah Arendt was right when she saw late modern humankind caught in a dangerous world-destroying cleft between a belief that everything is possible and a willingness to surrender itself to so-called laws of necessity (calculability itself) which would make everything possible. That it was, in short, characterised by a combination of reckless omnipotence and reckless despair. But I also think that things have gone one stage further—the surrender to the necessity of realising everything that is possible—and that this found its paradigmatic expression, for example, in the deterrent security policies of the Cold War; where everything up to and including self-immolation not only became possible but actually necessary in the interests of (inter)national security. This logic persists in the metaphysical core of modern politics—the axioms of interState security relations, popularised, for example, through strategic discourse— even if the details have changed.

Security never seems to make any progress. Despite military investments, security reviews and ever more powerful technological surveillance, European and North American populations are continually represented as unsafe. The most powerful states in the world, enjoying historically unprecedented levels of health, prosperity and stability, are simultaneously the most hysterically possessed by security-related fears. The compulsion to experience the self as insecure, despite evidence to the contrary, is the starting point for this paper. ¶ Much has been written about political anxiety in the fields of political theory and sociology. Corey Robin has explored the developing permutations of fear in Western philosophical thought as an operational concept (Robin 2004); Frank Furedi has explored how the social alienation and declining community ties associated with contemporary neoliberalism have led to cultures of insecurity (Furedi 2002), and Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck have both written about the transformation of risk and anxiety in an age where technology produces its own, sometimes existential, dangers (Beck 1992; Giddens 1990). Fear and risk are prominent topics on sociological and philosophical landscapes.¶ Not wanting to be left behind, international relations has also produced substantial literatures on the risk discourses and anxieties which dominate contemporary political life. Much of this research was initially located within the Copenhagen School of securitisation theory, which analysed the construction of threat by political elites and the centrality of speech acts to processes of securitisation (Buzan, Wæver, and De Wilde 1998; Hansen 2012a; McDonald 2008). The functionality of securitisation is here understood in terms of identity: identifying and invoking an external threat serves to performatively constitute the nation (Jackson 2005; McCrisken 2003).¶ In the wake of securitisation theory, European international relations developed a poststructuralist critique of Beck’s ‘Risk Society’ thesis. In their rethinking of risk, Claudia Aradau and Rens Van Munster critiqued Beck’s macro-sociological assumptions that risks exist independently in the world from the governmental technologies which invoke them (Aradau and Van Munster 2007). The incalculability of contemporary risks does not make them ungovernable, as Beck suggests; rather governance structures have shifted to incorporate the unpredictability of certain dangers into precautionary risk management. Incalculability becomes the modality of security.1 Poststructuralist International Relations has found fertile terrain in the idea of risks and their governance. Pushing this research beyond its focus on the security sector, Emmy Eklundh, Andreja Zevnik and Emmanuel Pierre-Guittet have explored the logics of anxiety at play in austerity politics and security governance, and the anxious and resistant subjectivities produced therein (Eklundh, Zevnik, and Pierre-Guittet 2017).¶ But what does it mean to centralise anxiety, fear and risk in Western political and sociological thought at a time of relative geopolitical stability and wealth? In his own take on the politics of anxiety, Mark Neocleous (2000) tackled the proliferation of (in)security and risk discourse in sociology and international relations, arguing that the acceleration of (in) securitisation reflects the policing of civil society to protect bourgeois property and status. The articulation of pollution, terrorism and migration as security threats depoliticises them; it silences the social and political creation of these issues, enabling governing structures to pursue technocratic solutions which efface the real genesis of threats: capital accumulation.¶ It is important to note that the arguments made by Neocleous, poststructuralist scholars of risk and securitisation theorists share more in common than their focus on political anxiety. They all also describe ambivalence within security practices towards the threat object. While politicians promise that destroying the enemy will bring about resolution and ontological stability, IR literatures show that frames of enmity enable the pursuit of other goals: biopolitical governance, identity consolidation and the furtherance of capital accumulation. There is a gap between security and its threat object. The threat object is made hypersignificant in political discourse, but it is simultaneously treated ambivalently and can be replaced at will. New objects wait in the wings as potential vessels for enmity.

But the story of crisis language in the twentieth-century is more complicated than that. When Thomas Wright of the Brookings Institute, pleaded with his readers just before the election to understand that we are “forty-eight hours away from a new world crisis” he did so in order to stress how rare the moment was, how singular the threat, and how urgent the need to defeat Trump. “World crises,” he argued, “are rare. They occur when a fault-line opens up in the international system that generates enormous instability and unleashes powerful opposing forces with no means of reconciling them.”¶ And yet, while “world crises” in these exact, global terms may be rare, the way Wright uses the idea is not. Indeed, those of us who study the discursive traditions attached to British and American forms of liberal imperialism over the last one hundred years know that crisis language – the kind that positions the “indispensable” imperial nation as perennially on the brink, always the only thing sewing together the fabric of the universe – has a long and ignoble history.¶ Claims that liberal values and Western Civilization are in immediate danger of decline are simply how liberals with an interest in rationalizing the continuing hegemonic/imperial power of their states imagine the movement of time. They are as common as air. Because at the very heart of the liberal imperial project lies a bundle of deeply unsettling and irreconcilable ideological contradictions that all cluster around one central, gnawing hypocrisy: how can an immensely powerful, heavily militarized state, that claims to be grounded on the ideals of freedom, democracy, and a respect for sovereign autonomy consistently deny those very ideals to vast swaths or the world’s population and still be liberal? This is the primal ideological wound that never fully heals, the discursive disconnect that requires constant rhetorical managing primarily by encouraging people to look elsewhere – anywhere – but at the contradiction. The idea of crisis, therefore, lies at the core of this liberal imperial politics of deflection. It is a key weapon in the rhetorical arsenal.¶ For instance, just before World War One and at the height of British imperial power, worried pro-imperial, liberal pundits associated with the Roundtable Society – shortly thereafter to become the Royal Society of International Affairs (Chatham House) whose members would play a not-insignificant role in helping to found the Council on Foreign Relations in America in 1921 – produced countless memoranda, journal articles, and papers fretting over the demise of the liberal world order, the dangerous waves of Indian laborers marauding through the Commonwealth, and the relentless rise of an ever expanding China.¶ Nearly one hundred years later, liberal internationalist scholar Ikenberry – who uses the word “crisis” in the titles of his published work perhaps more than any other IR scholar writing today – has made strikingly similar observations about the threat posed to the liberal international order by rising powers, particularly China. The clarifying logic at work for liberal British imperialists then, and contemporary supporters of America’s hegemony now, is always the same: “If not us, then who? China? Russia? Come on, really? At this moment of crisis, you’re going to choose them?” In the long twentieth-century of liberal imperialism – British and American – the idea of crisis looms so large that it blocks out the sun.¶ Again, my point in highlighting the ways members of the foreign policy establishment – Democrats and Republicans, liberal internationalists, realists, and neocons alike – participate in occluding the fact of American empire through their use of crisis language is not meant to suggest that there isn’t something profoundly troubling about the rise of Donald Trump. Nor am I implying that opposing fascism is not our primary responsibility as citizens and activists in this new era. Rather, I want to suggest that, in the long and brutal fight against Trumpism that is to come, we resist the temptation to let liberal imperialism off the hook for the sake of concentrating solely on the greater evil. Because when Democrats and Republicans insist again and again that the United States is a liberal hegemon, or an “indispensable nation,” or a democratic super power, or a reluctant world leader – anything other than an empire – what alternative to empire are we left with?¶ And if empire is the only thing we can ever expect, all the way down, then Trump and fascism are always going to be possibilities; they lie there, just below the thin surface of the “liberal, rules based order,” waiting to break through. We need to ask ourselves how, in this environment bristling with silences, misdirection, and deflection, we can create the space where another world becomes possible. The success of the Sanders movement in this country suggests that such alternative accounts of political life not only exist but have enormous popular support if only we can wrest them from the liberal crises that perennially narrow the aperture of our political vision.¶ The struggle now must be to tie a critique of liberal deflection on a domestic level with the fight against empire globally. That fight requires collective humility and sustained reflection on America’s role in the world. In other words, it requires forging the kinds of critiques, countermemories, and counternarratives that, in the words of Edward Said, “will not allow conscience to look away or fall asleep.”

The previous two sections have highlighted a number of ways in which practices of resistance and activism engage the relationship between ethics and security in different ways. In producing subjugated knowledges, revealing the exclusions and power relations of established discourses, and engaging in security practices which seek to more directly respond to the insecurity faced by ordinary people, they invite an ethical response to security and insecurity. However, it limits our engagement with practices of resistance if we only see them as exploring ‘better’ or ‘more ethical’ ways of providing security. The more radical challenge to the politics of security comes when we see activism not simply as refusing particular orders of security, but as resisting the very conceptual and political foundations of security. This final section explores such an interpretation, looking at the ways in which the most substantive way to engage the relationships between ethics, security, resistance and activism comes when we view practices of resistance as (at their best) working to deconstruct security. I begin by outlining some of the arguments which suggest that the concept of security cannot so easily be refashioned in a more ethical form and that thinking in terms of resistance might take us further. I then look at how we might view such a resistance in the context of political activism, looking at some examples from anarchist activist groups.¶ A number of writers have argued that the concept of security is built around a series of images, codes and logics which render it deeply problematic and a dangerous candidate for rehabilitation. They have pointed out the ways in which our contemporary fascination with proliferating images of threat, danger and response, grounded in desperate but impossible fantasies of control and mastery, tends towards authoritarian political formations and the de facto legitimacy of dominant power relations (Edkins 2003; Campbell 1998: Shepherd 2008: 72–75). The pursuit of security serves to contain subjects within the existing order, promising protection in return for some level of compliance or obedience in a manner not dissimilar to a protection racket (Spike Peterson 1992: 50–52). As Mark Neocleous notes, such dynamics serve to neutralise radical political action, ‘encouraging us to surrender ourselves to the state in a thoroughly conservative fashion’ (2008: 4).¶ To understand how the pursuit of security intertwines with political authority, it is important to recognise the dependent relationship between security and insecurity. Institutions and technologies of security can only function in a context of insecurities, which they may identify and seek to pacify, but which they also need (and for which, of course, they are often responsible). In Michael Dillon’s terms, ‘it is only because it is contoured by insecurity, and because in its turn it also insecures, that security can secure’ (1996: 127). The nature and content of security depends on its particular relationship with insecurity, with its exclusions and violences and particular (political) designations of threat. This regulative binary of security/insecurity intersects with others that have similar effects, such as order/chaos, inside/outside and sovereignty/anarchy. All of them regulate politics in a manner which cements the place of political authority. On the latter dichotomy, Richard Ashley’s comments are pertinent:¶ On the one hand, the sign of ‘sovereignty’ betokens a rational identity: a homogeneous and continuous presence that is hierarchically ordered, that has a unique centre of decision presiding over a coherent ‘self’, and that is demarcated from, and in opposition to, an external domain of difference and change that resists assimilation to its identical being. On the other hand, the sign of ‘anarchy’ betokens this residual external domain: an aleatory domain characterised by difference and discontinuity, contingency and ambiguity, that can be known only for its lack of the coherent truth and meaning expressed by a sovereign presence. ‘Anarchy’ signifies a problematic domain yet to be brought under the controlling influence of a sovereign centre … whether it be an individual actor, a group, a class, or a political community.¶ (1988: 230)¶ As he identifies the conservatising regulation at the heart of the sovereignty/anarchy dichotomy, so would I suggest that a similar process is at work in the logic of security, privileging that which is rationally bounded, coherent and compliant, and necessitating the pacification or pathologisation of that which is not.¶ Political imaginaries rooted in binary concepts limit our ethical landscape in a variety of ways. As V. Spike Peterson argues:¶ [a]s long as we remain locked in dichotomies, we cannot accurately understand and are less likely to transform social relations: not only do oppositional constructions distort the contextual complexity of social reality, they set limits on the questions we ask and the alternatives we consider. True to their “origin” (Athenian objectivist metaphysics), the dichotomies most naturalized in Western world views (abstract-concrete, reason-emotion, mind-body, culture-nature, public-private) are both medium and outcome of objectification practices. Retaining them keeps us locked in to their objectifying-reifying-lens on our world(s) and who we are.¶ (1992: 54)¶ In such a context, rather than seeking to rehabilitate security (and remain within this security/insecurity dichotomy), it might be more productive to resist, displace or deconstruct it.¶ This is not a simple prospect; refusing the social fantasy of security would, in Jenny Edkins’ terms, involve ‘facing, on a day-to-day basis, questions many of us prefer to forget, if we can’, and ‘would involve a shift away from the notion of sovereign state and sovereign individual … would entail the development of a new vision of political community, one that was not based on the coming together of discrete participles to produce closed systems’ (2003: 368–369). While the violent politics of security is enacted through social institutions, it is also (as the discussion above shows) embedded in categories of thought. The binaries of security/insecurity, order/chaos, sovereignty/anarchy and more impose a theoretical domination which conditions political possibility in particular authoritarian ways. As such, the task of resistance might be to break down such binaries. This may take place through mocking, subverting or outwardly refusing the closures such binaries enact (Rossdale forthcoming-a; Rossdale forthcoming-b), or through embracing the proliferation of definitions of security as an aporetic space in which ‘to think and create new social, ethical and economic relationships outside the oppressive structures of political and epistemological order’ (Burke 2007: 30–31).¶ What I want to suggest here is that we can interpret many practices of activism and resistance as engaging in precisely this kind of resistance to security/insecurity; that is, not just as affirming ‘more ethical’ securities (though they may also do this), but as mounting a challenge to the conceptual and political order of security more generally. In a sense, this is not surprising, so often is resistance framed as that insecurity, chaos and anarchy which necessitates securing, ordering and sovereign gestures. It is also an unstable series of interventions, liable to recuperation within a set of security discourses which swiftly reposition challenge as threat. Nonetheless, these resistances hold open spaces for an ethical critique not only of particular orders of security, but more generally of the ways in which security orders.

Securitization and desecuritization ¶ The ceteris paribus normative push, and political recommendation of the securitization approach has been ‘less security, more politics’, and the development of ‘possible modalities’ for the desecuritization of politics (Wæver 1989a, 52): it is generally (which can only be assessed in practice though) more conducive to treat identities as identities, religion as religion, the environment as the environment, and so on, and to engage their politics through the particular modalities and rationalities of those fields rather than those of security. In the received reading, whilst securitization raises issues into the realm of security policies and practices (arrow 2a in Figure 1), desecuritization lowers issues back into the realm of ‘regular politics’ or removes issues from the political agenda altogether (arrow 1 in Figure 1). ¶ Desecuritization can be achieved through a number of options: by simply not talking about issues in terms of security, by keeping responses to securitized issues in forms that do not create security dilemmas or other vicious spirals, and by moving security issues back into ‘normal politics’ (Wæver 2000, 253). These options can follow objectivist, constructivist or deconstructivist strategies in bringing about desecuritization (Huysmans (1995, 65–67). These strategies differ in regard to how the process relates to the claimed threat: has the threat been dealt with, can the security drama be somehow handled from without, or can identities beyond security threats be produced from within the process. ¶ Beyond conceptualizing desecuritization as an option or a strategy, it has also been viewed from the viewpoint of political actors (de Wilde 2008, 597), and their political moves in games of contestation and resistance (Vuori 2011a, 2015). There can be desecuritizing actors who evade, circumvent or directly oppose securitizing moves by, for example, emphasizing competing threats (de Wilde 2008, 597). Security policies aim at desecuritization (the solution to the threatening situation), but desecuritization can also happen independently from the actions of securitizing or desecuritizing actors: the original security problem may be solved, institutions may adapt through new reproductive structures, discourses may change (e.g., with the loss of interest or audiences), and the original referent object may be lost (de Wilde 2008). ¶ A key issue of debate has been on whether desecuritization can be considered to be an active political process, or whether desecuritization can only happen as a fading away of the issue (Behnke 2006, 65): the question is whether the logic and possibility of securitization is necessarily retained in explicit discussions of whether an issue has retained the status of a security issue. As empirical studies of securitization and desecuritization dynamics (e.g., Salter and Mutlu 2013; Lupovici 2014; Vuori 2015; Donnelly 2015) have shown, it is difficult to point to a definitive end point for either securitization or desecuritization: political and social situations evolve. Whichever the philosophical stance on how and whether desecuritization can be achieved (Vuori 2011a), such empirical studies show that political actors do make active desecuritization moves. ¶ Indeed, systematizing empirical studies of desecuritization, Hansen (2012, 529; 539–545) has identified four ideal type forms for the concept. In regard to its issues of concern, namely the status of enmity and the possibility of a public sphere, when a larger conflict is still within the realm of possibility, but when a particular issue is presented with terms other than security, we have an instance of (1) ‘change through stabilisation’ (arrow 2b in Figure 1); when another issue takes the place of a previously securitized issue, we have (2) ‘replacement’; when the originally phrased threat is resolved, we have (3) rearticulation; and finally, when potentially insecure subjects are marginalized through depoliticization, we have (4) ‘silencing’ (types 2–3 are represented by arrow 1 in Figure 1). ¶ The previous literature on both securitization (arrow 2a in Figure 1) and desecuritization (arrow 1 in Figure 1) has produced ample illustrations of both dynamics. As a brief example of how both dynamics can alter between the same political actors, we can use some of the vicissitudes of Sino-Soviet relations. ¶ China entered the Cold War in the Soviet camp and relied on the Soviet Union as the guarantee of the international security of the new People’s Republic. Chinese views in the late 1940s clearly structured the world into two opposing camps, with China firmly in the Soviet one (Mao 1949). In the 1950s, however, Sino-Soviet relations soured, and the following ‘Sino-Soviet split’ (Lüthi 2008) has been used as an example of the capacity of ‘parochial’ securitizations to become disaffected by or even be withdrawn from dominant ‘macrosecuritizations’ (Buzan and Wæver 2009, 257). ¶ Following the split, Sino-Soviet relations in the 1960s were characterized by intensive ideological conflict, and Mao Zedong securitized Soviet revisionism as a major threat for the Chinese Communist Party (Vuori 2011b). Indeed, newly available documents suggest that it was the Chinese side, in effect Mao Zedong, which was more active in the pursuit of ideological conflict (Lüthi 2008, 2). In his securitization of the Soviet Union, Mao linked the revisionism he identified there to that which he also securitized domestically (Vuori 2011b), and the issue of revisionism was presented as an issue of life and death for the party. ¶ Sino-Soviet relations began to mend in the 1980s with the removal of a number of political obstacles and with the intensification of the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union (Wishnick 2001). Yet, it is only with the fall of the Soviet Union that we can see an overall desecuritization in the form of rearticulation (Hansen 2012, 542–544) taking place in Sino-Russian relations. In the aftermath of the end of the Cold War, China’s line was not to take the lead in international affairs. China worked towards ‘world multipolarization’, which was exemplified with China and Russia forming a ‘strategic partnership’ in 1996. China and Russia even shared the same ‘threat package’ of ‘terrorism, separatism, and religious extremism’ (the ‘three evils’) within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (Jackson 2006, 310). These are strong indicators of how the two states have managed to reform their identities away from the Sino-Soviet antagonism. In the overall state relations then, we can see a rearticulative desecuritization tactic at play on both sides: ever since the early 1980s, China’s policy towards the Soviet Union (and later Russia) shifted from antagonism to one of collaboration and negotiation rather than securitization.¶ Desecuritization can be conceptualized in the above manner as a negative ontological corollary to securitization. Yet, it is also prudent to investigate securitization and desecuritization as political moves in order to potentially understand the logic of when and how they are wielded in practical politics. It is proposed here that in addition to instances where a securitized situation is dismantled (arrow 1 in Figure 1), desecuritization can also be viewed as a political move that can be deployed before ‘securitization plays’ in a game of securitization (arrow 2a in Figure 1). In other words, desecuritization moves – both in terms of discourse and practice – can be used in a pre-emptive manner before the threshold of securitization is reached (arrow 2b in Figure 1). For Wæver (2000, 254), silencing can be a strategy to ‘pre-empt or forestall securitization’. We argue here that beyond silencing, active desecuritization efforts can be made to block the escalation of a contention. Thereby, in addition to change through stabilization (Hansen 2012) and the silencing of an issue (Wæver 2000), there can be explicit rebuttals of security frames and claims before they are solidified into policy. This tactic can be termed ‘pre-emptive desecuritization through rebuttal’.

In the modern context, the intimate linkage between politics and knowledge is established and reproduced through separation. Only by distancing itself from the particularities of politics and developing the language of universal reason can science establish its political relevance. This paradoxical relationship turns on its head the widely shared assumption that increasing levels of abstraction—from empirical to theoretical and metatheoretical work—undermine political relevance. Instead, with every step away from concrete policies, academic studies address broader questions, speak to wider audiences, and play a more foundational role for politics (Eriksson 2014, 102). Each of these levels of abstraction, moreover, constitutes an integral part of modern science and therefore also of its political relevance. “Practically relevant knowledge” is therefore not possible without “metatheoretical reflection” (Reus-Smit 2013, 605), and vice versa.¶ Locating the discipline of IR within the context of this relationship between politics and knowledge also illuminates the nature and function of some of its core features. It shows that the poverty of its subject matter, its fragmentation, and its immaturity arise from the ultimate limitation of modern knowledge—its inability to provide an account of totality—and is therefore common to all modern sciences. Within this context, however, fragmentation does not function as a barrier to scientific progress. Instead, it drives it in the form of greater theoretical pluralism. And far from indicating an “end of theory,” the waxing and waning of metatheoretical debates results from the political implications and limitations of scientific knowledge.¶ These dynamics of modern scientific development, in turn, carry with them political implications. Despite its universalist aspirations, modern knowledge is always partial and can only illuminate norms already embodied in given practices rather than generating guiding principles for practice (Weber 1948, 147). For this reason, the role of IR scholars interested in improving politics cannot be reduced to the “heroic” one “of providing scientifically derived knowledge by which foreign policy may be guided,” but must fundamentally include “the ‘ironic’ one of ensuring that rival explanations can be heard” (Zambernardi 2016, 4–5).¶ Theory, in sum, plays a pivotal role for the constitution, reproduction, and progressive development of IR as a modern science. What is more, theory at every level of abstraction plays a constitutive role for the political relevance of modern science in general. And theory, at every level of abstraction, also plays a directly political role. Theory, in short, is both indispensable and highly practical.¶ Finally, the implications of the present study apply also to its own findings. By focusing on the common epistemic basis of the modern sciences and modern politics, I established connections between politics and knowledge, and between IR and other disciplines. This highlights the political relevance of abstract and concrete, good and bad quality, and accessible and inaccessible studies. Yet, by focusing on the modern episteme, this study necessarily abstracts from the ontological dimension—from the specificities of politics and knowledge, the differences between IR and other modern sciences, between abstract and concrete, critical and mainstream, good- and bad-quality work. The source of the confusion over the relevance of IR, however, has always lain in the epistemic basis of the relation between modern politics and the sciences.

The only way out of such a dilemma, to escape the fetish, is perhaps to eschew the logic of security altogether – to reject it as so ideologically loaded in favour of the state that any real political thought other than the authoritarian and reactionary should be pressed to give it up. That is clearly something that cannot be achieved within the limits of bourgeois thought and thus could never even begin to be imagined by the security intellectual. It is also something that the constant iteration of the refrain ‘this is an insecure world’ and reiteration of one fear, anxiety and insecurity after another will also make it hard to do. But it is something that the critique of security suggests we may have to consider if we want a political way out of the impasse of security.¶ This impasse exists because security has now become so all-encompassing that it marginalises all else, most notably the constructive conflicts, debates and discussions that animate political life. The constant prioritising of a mythical security as a political end – as the political end – constitutes a rejection of politics in any meaningful sense of the term. That is, as a mode of action in which differences can be articulated, in which the conflicts and struggles that arise from such differences can be fought for and negotiated, in which people might come to believe that another world is possible – that they might transform the world and in turn be transformed. Security politics simply removes this; worse, it removes it while purportedly addressing it. In so doing it suppresses all issues of power and turns political questions into debates about the most efficient way to achieve ‘security’, despite the fact that we are never quite told – never could be told – what might count as having achieved it. Security politics is, in this sense, an anti-politics,141 dominating political discourse in much the same manner as the security state tries to dominate human beings, reinforcing security fetishism and the monopolistic character of security on the political imagination. We therefore need to get beyond security politics, not add yet more ‘sectors’ to it in a way that simply expands the scope of the state and legitimises state intervention in yet more and more areas of our lives.¶ Simon Dalby reports a personal communication with Michael Williams, co-editor of the important text Critical Security Studies, in which the latter asks: if you take away security, what do you put in the hole that’s left behind? But I’m inclined to agree with Dalby: maybe there is no hole.142 The mistake has been to think that there is a hole and that this hole needs to be filled with a new vision or revision of security in which it is re-mapped or civilised or gendered or humanised or expanded or whatever. All of these ultimately remain within the statist political imaginary, and consequently end up reaffirming the state as the terrain of modern politics, the grounds of security. The real task is not to fill the supposed hole with yet another vision of security, but to fight for an alternative political language which takes us beyond the narrow horizon of bourgeois security and which therefore does not constantly throw us into the arms of the state. That’s the point of critical politics: to develop a new political language more adequate to the kind of society we want. Thus while much of what I have said here has been of a negative order, part of the tradition of critical theory is that the negative may be as significant as the positive in setting thought on new paths.¶ For if security really is the supreme concept of bourgeois society and the fundamental thematic of liberalism, then to keep harping on about insecurity and to keep demanding ‘more security’ (while meekly hoping that this increased security doesn’t damage our liberty) is to [foreclose] [blind] ourselves to the possibility of building real alternatives to the authoritarian tendencies in contemporary politics. To situate ourselves against security politics would allow us to circumvent the debilitating effect achieved through the constant securitising of social and political issues, debilitating in the sense that ‘security’ helps consolidate the power of the existing forms of social domination and justifies the short-circuiting of even the most democratic forms. It would also allow us to forge another kind of politics centred on a different conception of the good. We need a new way of thinking and talking about social being and politics that moves us beyond security. This would perhaps be emancipatory in the true sense of the word. What this might mean, precisely, must be open to debate. But it certainly requires recognising that security is an illusion that has forgotten it is an illusion; it requires recognising that security is not the same as solidarity; it requires accepting that insecurity is part of the human condition, and thus giving up the search for the certainty of security and instead learning to tolerate the uncertainties, ambiguities and ‘insecurities’ that come with being human; it requires accepting that ‘securitizing’ an issue does not mean dealing with it politically, but bracketing it out and handing it to the state; it requires us to be brave enough to return the gift.143

Since the 2008 financial crash, the world has witnessed an unprecedented outbreak of social protest in every major continent. Beginning with the birth of the Occupy movement in the US and Western Europe, and the Arab Spring, the eruption of civil unrest has continued to wreak havoc unpredictably from Greece to Ukraine, from China to Thailand, from Brazil to Turkey, and beyond. In some regions, civil unrest has coalesced into the collapse of incumbent governments or even the eruption of a prolonged state of internecine warfare, as is happening in Iraq-Syria and Ukraine Crimea. To what extent is this apparent heightening of geopolitical instability new? ¶ Increasing public dissatisfaction with government is correlated with continued government difficulties in meeting public expectations. Yet while policymakers and media observers have raced to keep up with events, they have largely missed the deeper causes of this new age of unrest—the end of the age of cheap fossil fuels, and its multiplying consequences for economic growth, industrial food production, and the Earth’s climate stability. ¶ Contrary to widely reported claims across mainstream media of a new era of prosperity heralded by the US-led shale oil and gas boom, the proliferation of contemporary climate, food and economic crises have at their root a single common denominator: the fundamental and permanent disruption in the energy basis of industrial civilization. ¶ This inevitable energy transition away from high quality fossil fuels to lower quality, more expensive energy forms—which will be completed well before the close of this century, and quite possibly much earlier—will force a paradigm shift in the organization of civilization. The twenty-first century, in this context, is a pivotal one for humanity as industrial civilization pivots through a process of systemic transition, driven by the complex interplay between human societies and biophysical realities. ¶ Yet for this shift to result in a viable new way of life will require a fundamental epistemological shift recognizing humanity’s embeddedness in the natural world. This, in turn, cannot be achieved without breaking the stranglehold of conventional models achieved through the hegemony of establishment narratives—dominated by fossil fuel interests and the banality of the mainstream media news cycle.¶ The central thesis of this study is that the escalation of social protest and political instability around the world is causally related to the unstoppable thermodynamics of global hydrocarbon energy decline and its interconnected environmental and economic consequences. It offers, in this sense, a biophysical approach to international relations, and argues that geopolitics remains fundamentally embedded in biophysical processes. This is not to reduce geopolitics to the biophysical—far from it—but to recognize that the dynamics of the geopolitical cannot be dislocated from the dynamics of the biophysical, and that biophysical processes are increasingly driving geopolitical instability to a degree unrecognized by policymakers, the media, as well as social and natural scientists.¶ Hydrocarbon energy decline can be understood as consisting of the following two intertwined processes: the inexorable reduction in industrial civilization’s production of net energy from hydrocarbon sources (fossil fuels) over the last decades; the acceleration of hydrocarbon energy production to attempt to make-up for this decline and sustain economic growth.¶ This process has in turn had two major consequences, namely: climate change and the corresponding destabilization of the Earth System due to the increasing quantity of greenhouse gas emissions due to hydrocarbon energy dependence; and the permanent slowdown of global economic growth due to the increasing costs of energy production relative to GDP. Climate and economic crises are, in turn, acting as amplifying feedbacks on the process of hydrocarbon energy decline, and in themselves are acting synergistically to undermine global industrial food production while simultaneously impinging on socio-political stability and human well-being.¶ While conventional policy and media approaches to socio-political instability tend to focus almost purely on ‘surface’ social symptoms—geopolitical competition, political corruption, economic mismanagement, ideological extremism, and so on—the deeper biophysical systemic drivers of instability are largely ignored or misunderstood. As such, missing from the vast bulk of conventional wisdom on escalating socio-political instability around the world is the crucial recognition of its central cause in a systemic process of hydrocarbon energy decline and concomitant civilizational transition toward an inevitable post-carbon future.¶ Currently, climate change is rightly and consensually recognized by the scientific community and has been accepted at least in principle by policymakers as a reality requiring an urgent collective response from human societies. However, despite growing recognition of the interconnected nature of these crises—illustrated through concepts such as the food-water-energy nexus—there remains a fundamental failure in the conceptualization of their interconnected nature in terms of the relationship between human societies and the biophysical environment, and relatedly, the relationship between human polities and the biophysical environment.¶ This root failure of conceptualization is perhaps the most significant factor focusing on the role of human agency in driving the current convergence of global crises. The failure is compounded by the necessarily compartmentalized nature of scientific specialization, which has produced a vast volume of information, but little in the way of epistemological mechanisms to integrate that into knowledge across disciplinary boundaries. It is further compounded by the transmission of incorrect conceptual diagnoses of global crises through the global mainstream media. The perpetual transmission of false and inaccurate knowledge on the origins and dynamic of global crises has created a situation in which as such crises accelerate, the human species as a whole is disempowered from being able to correctly understand these crises and their symptoms, and thus unable to solve them.¶ Yet to diagnose the intensifying perfect storm of climate, energy and economic crises requires a fundamental reconceptualization of their true nature as symptoms of an overall civilizational system which, increasingly, cannot be sustained by the biophysical environment.¶ This study offers an empirically-grounded social scientific theoretical framework for developing a holistic approach to this perfect storm through the lens of what this author has called the ‘Crisis of Civilization’ (as opposed to a ‘clash of civilizations’). My approach is not to create yet another new statistical model to add to the plethora of models that exist, but to strike at a deeper lacuna within the discipline of international relations—to create the beginnings of an accurate, integrated transdisciplinary theoretical basis for such modelling, derived from a holistic analysis of the relevant empirical data.¶ The study is divided into two main sections. The first consists of a general framework of the broad crises that this author considers to be integral to the biophysical processes driving geopolitical instability today. The second consists of a series of case studies which provide specific empirical data supporting and building on this general framework to test how and whether they are indeed acting out on local, national and regional levels as is my hypothesis. This opening section begins by building on this author’s previous work on the ‘Crisis of Civilization’ as an overarching analytical framework for the integrated examination of global climate, energy, food, economic and socio-political crises (Ahmed 2010 , 2011 ). This is achieved by establishing the inherent systemic interconnections between these crises on a global macro-level scale. The monograph then proceeds to explore how the general framework of biophysical factors aka the ‘Crisis of Civilization’ plays out at a micro-level within specific countries in key regions—the Middle East, Africa, Europe, South Asia, and North America. This examination takes us to the crux of my argument and provides specific evidence that the biophysical processes discussed more generally in the opening are, in fact, already having concrete geopolitical impacts accelerating the destabilization of human societies across the world, in a manner that can now be detected through a holistic and transdisciplinary empirical analysis. This not only provides surprising empirical vindication for our hypothesis that biophysical processes are playing an integral causal role in the intensification of political and geopolitical disruption on a global scale, it also provides us a basis to explore some tentative business-as-usual (BAU) forecasts.¶ This permits further exploration of the intersection between the thermodynamics of escalating hydrocarbon energy decline and the accelerating disruption of global industrial civilization. As prevailing social, political and economic structures become increasingly dysfunctional against the strain of hydrocarbon energy decline, the resulting rupture manifests in an increasing frequency of social protest and violent conflict.¶ Part of this study, then, identifies how conventional governmental, industry and media narratives of these crises for the most part fail to accurately understand them, not just due to a lack of a holistic-systemic frameworks for examining these crises as interdependent—but due to a fundamental epistemological failure that has allowed mythological ‘theories’ of human progress in the form of neoclassical and neoliberal economics to become entrenched as the dominant cognitive paradigm. The most powerful hegemonic component of this ideological capture of human collective cognition occurs through the global institutions associated with the mainstream media. The principal problem here is a highly compromised ownership and editorial structure that ties media outlets to the very prevailing structures of fossil fuel-centric power complicit in global crisis acceleration. The preponderance of fossil fuel-centric interests in conventional media ownership has led to consistently inaccurate reporting on energy issues, and their relationships with economic, food and climate crises, as well as specific conflicts.¶ Yet to some extent, and compounding the insular ideological approach of powerful government, industry and media institutions, there has been a similar failure from amongst experts in different fields of these crises, who have been unable to develop theoretical, conceptual and empirical frameworks to view their specialized data in its inherent interconnections with data from other fields. In other words, a lack of generalized systems training in our schools. Due to this problem, we are beginning to grasp only recently the extent to which geopolitical ruptures that overwhelm of the news of the day have been exacerbated by a convergence of crises studied largely separately in these disparate fields. There is, therefore, little understanding of how energy and resource depletion tangibly impact the political economies of different societies, and how these processes interact with the local impacts of global processes like climate change.¶ This has led to a knowledge deficit—specifically, a whole systems knowledge deficit comprising a paucity of reliable, actionable knowledge in the mainstream, exacerbating a sense of public apathy and confusion, and cementing a policymaking impasse among political leaders who remain subject to a fatal combination of intensive fossil fuel lobbying and media misinformation.¶ Among the most critical solutions to the ‘Crisis of Civilization’, then, is a concerted grassroots mobilization to rectify the whole systems knowledge deficit. This could be achieved in many different ways—whether through responsible journalism or more informed policy formulation based on the effective communication of interdisciplinary scientific research—but the end goal is the same: mass public education with a view to catalyze social action that is systemically transformative. Without addressing the knowledge deficit, the self-reinforcing cycle of amplifying crisis feedbacks cannot be overturned.¶ It is hoped that this study can begin contributing to addressing the whole systems knowledge deficit by firstly, establishing a scientifically-grounded systems theory framework for integrating data from different fields for the study of international politics; secondly, beginning the process of recognizing major geopolitical ruptures in the context of systemic crises driven by biophysical processes; thirdly, outlining the basis for a major, urgent new transdisciplinary research program bringing together the natural and social sciences to develop a holistic theoretical-empirical model of global crisis convergence; which in turn can pave the way for a fourth major, urgent new transdisciplinary action-research program on mitigating the impact of global crisis convergence, while transitioning human civilization to new more viable political economic structures that subsist in parity with their biophysical contexts. ¶ Chapter 2 The Crisis of Civilization as an Analytical Framework ¶ 2.1 The Human-Environment System as a Complex Adaptive System¶ The idea of a ‘Crisis of Civilization’ pivots around the goal of understanding human activity as a whole. It is premised on the fact that as a single biological species, human beings share common individual and social characteristics through which they interact with each other, with other species, and with the biophysical environment.¶ Global civilization constitutes the full mechanism of social organization by which this nexus of activities and interactions operates. I use a ‘Crisis of Civilization’ framework to examine multiple, seemingly disparate global and local crises. This does not obviate the specific and distinctive dynamics of those crises but permits examination of how these crises interrelate with one another in the context of the overarching global system of which they are part.¶ The theorization of human civilization as a “complex adaptive system” derives from the application of complex systems theory as developed in relation to biological systems and ecosystems (Kauffmann; Dyke; Homer-Dixon; Diamond). A rich and dense literature demonstrates that complex systems are found across the natural sciences in physics, chemistry, and biology (Ross and Arkin 2009), as well as in ecology (May et al. 2008) and economics (Farmer et al. 2012 ).¶ A system exists whenever a plurality of entities subsists in which each entity functions in some sort of relationship with the others. A complex system exists when the relations between these parts leads the system as a whole to display emergent properties and behavior which cannot be reduced solely to the nature of its different parts and their relationships. Those emergent properties can be codifi ed as overarching rules that characterize the system’s structure as a whole. In some cases this can be done mathematically, although this is a less useful approach when examining human societies. ¶ A complex adaptive system exists when the system as a whole is able to adapt— to generate a collective shift in its internal behavior in order to survive. Thus, while the relations between parts of a system generates the emergent structures that comprise the system as a whole, those relationships are, in turn, restrained and enabled by those wider structures. This circular relationship is integral to the system’s capacity to adapt to new environmental conditions. In time this is done by evolution; more immediately this can be done by behavioral changes or species shifts. ¶ Equally, due to the nested and interconnected nature of the components of a complex adaptive system, small perturbations in one part can have ramifying effects on other parts of the system, depending on how they are connected. This sort of internal positive feedback process means that the overall structure of a system can be greatly impacted by seemingly random occurrences—those structures can either be reinforced or undermined by these internal feedback processes. ¶ When such internal feedback processes reach certain thresholds, or ‘tipping points’, they can induce fundamental re-ordering of key structures in the system as a whole—the convergence of multiple tipping points, in turn, can generate a systemwide adaptive cycle of re-structuring, a ‘phase shift’, through which the system undergoes a transition to a new equilibrium (Holling 2001 ). ¶ The human-environment system is complex and adaptive because it represents a historically evolving civilizational form comprised of a vast interlocking array of nested sub-systems, including some from the earth’s geology, resources, oceans, and atmosphere; multiple living and non-living ecosystems across these domains; and human systems, comprised of psychological, cultural and ideological fi elds, relations of production and associated modes of energy extraction, technological and economic systems, and political structures. ¶ Thus, the ‘Crisis of Civilization’ framework is a systems approach that attempts to analyze the complex interrelationships between multiple global crises and human activities as a whole, thus understanding them not simply as discrete crises and activities in themselves, but as component factors of a wider global human environmental system with its own emergent properties and behaviors. ¶ This approach recognizes that each of these crises pertains to a specifi c subsystem in itself, with distinctive features and patterns of behavior, but equally recognizes that each of these sub-systems do not exist in isolation. Rather, their mutual interrelationship generates emergent patterns characterizing the system as a whole. Those emergent structural features, in turn, exert causal regulatory effects that shape, enable and constrain the behaviors of the sub-systems. ¶ A systems approach thus views particular crises and associated human activities as discrete sub-systems which are, nevertheless, inherently interconnected as subsystems in an emergent human-environmental system, captured through the concept of a world-scale human civilization. It is in this respect that the ‘Crisis of Civilization’ as an analytical framework is able to systemically locate multiple crises as interconnected features of a wider world-scale crisis in human civilization as an emergent macro-structure. By integrating detailed trans-disciplinary examination of crisis sub-systems with analysis of their systemic interconnections within the world-scale human-environment system, a much clearer picture of the precise drivers, dynamics and potential trajectories of these crises is possible. This permits discernment of a birds-eye perspective of overall civilizational structures and their emergent direction. ¶ Examining human civilization as a complex adaptive system, therefore, permits multiple global crises to be understood through the lens of a range of powerful concepts with solid empirical basis in the biophysical sciences—the thresholds and tipping points of feedback processes; how interconnections between different crises can generate amplifying feedbacks with the potential to accelerate the breaching of tipping points; the extent to which different crises can be seen as properly systemic— that is, related fundamentally to the key global structures integral to the prevailing dynamic of human civilization; and how these crises relate to the system’s adaptive capacity, in particular, whether they are generating a major ‘phase change’ in the system itself. ¶ In particular, this allows analysis of human civilization to return to a scientific framework defied by the thermodynamics of the fossil fuel system, and the evolution and adaptation of species, bringing in critical insights from the physical and natural sciences that can inform the development of robust historical and sociological theories. ¶ 2.2 The Energy Metabolism of Human Civilization ¶ Applications of complex systems approaches to social, environmental and economic phenomena have largely neglected the most fundamental factor in the evolution and adaptation of complex systems: energy metabolism. ¶ Extensive research in the biological and ecological sciences demonstrates that an organism’s relation to the environment is mediated fundamentally through the mode and manner by which it extracts energy from the environment, to maintain and improve its distance from thermodynamic equilibrium. Living systems extract free energy from the sun, store it, and use it. Further, they can reproduce as well as collect, process, and exchange information in order to control and direct energy and matter they receive from their environments (Terzis and Arp 2011 ; Hall et al. 1992 ). ¶ According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, physical systems display a tendency to dissipate energy and thus transition from states of order to increasing disorder. Therefore, physicist Erwin Schrödinger defined a living system as an embodiment of “negative entropy” as they “extract order” from their environments to survive, adapt and evolve. (Schrodinger 1944 ) ¶ A living system or organism is thus defined by its ability to store energy under energy fl ow, before dissipation. It develops, maintains and reproduces, or renews, itself by mobilizing material and energy extracted from the environment, which is stored internally through cyclic non-dissipative processes coupled to irreversible dissipative processes. This permits the organism to survive precisely through the consumption and ordering of energy within systemic biological processes organized through genetic information protocols. The capacity to extract, store and mobilize stored energy is therefore integral to a reproducing life cycle. Eventually, of course, the energy must be irreversibly dissipated as required by the Second Law. But the increasing complexity of a living system is related directly to its capacity to extract, store and mobilize stored energy, and to thereby stave off the thermodynamic dissipation of energy. (Ho 1999) ¶ Organisms which successfully adapt to changing or challenging environmental conditions do so through the superior processing of information about those external conditions through genetic modification, reflecting increased efficiencies in energy extraction, storage and mobilization in relationship with the environment. (Schneider and Kay 1994 ) ¶ The thermodynamics of living systems applies, of course, not just to any single individual organism, but simultaneously to collections of organisms inhabiting specific environments. While human beings are the most advanced—that is, complex— biological organisms known to science, human civilization constitutes a complex adaptive system which has been able to maximize energy extraction, storage and mobilization from its environment far more efficiently and powerfully than ever before. The astonishing complexity of human civilization is related directly to its capacity to harness energy from the environment through numerous sub-systemic processes of social organization, thus maintaining increasing distance from thermodynamic equilibrium (Odum 1994). ¶ This framework allows for a more complete empirically-grounded theorization of what the contemporary escalation of global environmental and economic crises entails for the current trajectory of human civilization. Over its historical evolution, human civilization has demonstrated a relationship with its environment involving escalating energy use and energy dissipation, with wide-ranging consequences for the stability of the global human-environment system. ¶ Social power is an organic constitution grounded in an exploitative relationship with nature by which energy is extracted from natural resources, transformed into a commodity (through production) and eventually consumed. Energy is thus the very condition of production—but to examine the fl uctuating relationship between the two requires the recognition of social power through property : that is, the way access to land, resources and technology to enable energy production is mediated through property rights, which in turn are related to confi gurations of class (Wood 1981 ; Aston et al. 1987 ; Rioux and Dufour 2008 ). ¶ It is therefore necessary, in examining the energy trajectory of human civilization as a whole, to investigate inequalities in social power and class in the context of differentiated access to land, resources and technology between various human groups, and how this relates to the thermodynamics of energy as applied to human society as a complex adaptive system. This will enable us to properly grasp the processes of extraction, transformation and consumption of energy through labor, and varying relationships between society, labor, technology and natural resources, that are integral to diagnosing human civilization’s current predicament (Foster et al. 2010 ; Hall and Klitgaard 2012 ). ¶ The historical development of human civilization illustrates an accelerating trend in global net energy production driven by a series of increasingly sophisticated technological breakthroughs, each linked to fundamental shifts in the humanenvironment relations and corresponding socio-political and economic systems of organization. These civilizational phase-shifts toward more complex forms can be conceptualized in multiple overlapping ways. ¶ These phase-shifts have encompassed fundamental transitions in the energy metabolism of human societies—in terms of both the types of energy extracted, and the relations of production by which this energy is extracted, stored and mobilized in society through the creation of goods and services. These energy sources include our own muscle and that of animals, as well as wood, wind, water, coal, oil, and nuclear power (LePoire et al. 2015 ). The relations of production accompanying these phase shifts have included the following social-property relations: huntergatherer, nomadic, pastoral, agrarian, feudalism, slavery, agrarian capitalism, industrial capitalism, and neoliberal fi nance capitalism, which is rapidly moving to a new phase of late capitalism predominated by information technology and artifi cial intelligence (Ahmed 2009 ). ¶ It is also important to note that each new phase-shift does not necessarily constitute a clean break with previous shifts, but in the course of increasing complexity often builds on or incorporates older structures within a new, wider structural context. One useful way of understanding this process in an evolutionary fashion is through Arthur Koestler’s concept of nested self-organizing hierarchical systems which successively incorporate less complex systems to create higher scales of overarching complexity (Pichler 1999 ). ¶ While the latest phase shift of neoliberal fi nance capitalism has been able to generate an unprecedented level of wealth within the system, it has simultaneously developed an unprecedented degree of global inequality between the core—consisting of a transnational nexus of class power centred in the former G8—dominating the world’s productive resources including energy, raw materials, military and information technology; and the periphery—whose countries remains largely subordinated to the global structures institutionalized by the core (Ahmed 2009 ; Tainter 1990 ). ¶ 2.3 The Physics of System Failure ¶ Today, human civilization under late capitalism maintains its increasing distance from thermodynamic equilibrium via the throughput of vast quantities of increasingly depleted fossil fuel reserves, along with other fi nite and increasingly scarce resources such as metal ores, radionucleotides, rare earth elements, phosphate fertilizer, arable land, and fresh water (Nekola et al. 2013 ). ¶ One indicator of the system’s growing complexity today is the measure of material throughput, or economic growth—Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Under capitalist social-property relations, GDP must continuously increase through the maximization of private sector profi ts, simply for businesses to survive in the competitive marketplace and for the economy to maintain its ability to meet the consumption requirements of a growing population. However, as the complexity of human civilization has advanced, the continual growth in material throughput is correlated with an escalating rate of depletion of energy and raw materials, as well as an acceleration in the dissipation of energy through intensifying greenhouse gas emissions. ¶ Robust scientifi c assessments now demonstrate that the continuation of those biophysical processes of environmental degradation in a business-as-usual scenario will, before the end of the twenty-fi rst century, fundamentally undermine the biophysical basis of human civilization in its current mode of material organization and structural complexity. Further, the uncontrolled energy releases generated by these biophysical processes are manifested in climate change, extreme weather events, and natural disasters (Earth System Disruption); and drives geopolitical competition, social unrest, and violent confl ict (Human System Destabilization). ¶ These manifestations of dissipative energy release can be seen as distinctive feedback processes resulting from human civilization’s accelerating exploitation of fossil fuel energy sources within the context of the biophysical limits of the environment. In turn, these two strands of systemic feedbacks—Earth System Disruption (ESD) and Human System Destabilization (HSD)—are occurring within a single, overarching human-environment system, and thus are already inherently interconnected, therefore feeding back into each other. ¶ This mutual feedback process creates an amplifying global systemic feedback in which: (1) ESD drives HSD, which in turn generates ‘security’ issues perceived through the lens of ‘threat’ and ‘risk’ analysis; (2) this invites traditional securitized human responses that focus on the expansion of existing military, political and economic power to stabilize existing structures of authority and advance prevailing mechanisms of energy extraction and mobilization; (3) the entrenchment and expansion of existing structures undermines human civilization’s capacity to pursue structural modifications to ameliorate, mitigate or prevent [Earth Systems Disruption] ESD, thus intensifying ESD; (4) the feedback process continues as ESD drives further [Human System Destabilization] HSD. ¶ The trajectory of this amplifying global systemic feedback, carried to its logical conclusion and assuming no intervening shift, is simply the protracted, cascading collapse of human civilization in its current form toward increasingly less complex, and therefore less resource-intensive configurations, corresponding to available resources and constrained within the environmental limits imposed by accelerating climate change (Tainter 1990).

Whether external or internal audiences impose costs on leaders who fail to honor their states' commitments, audience costs can operate as a commitment device. Because of these costs, the likelihood for a state to intervene on behalf of an ally is greater than it would have been for the same state to intervene in the same crisis without the alliance. The formal alliance thus serves as a commitment device. Without it, the relevant audience would not hold the leader or state responsible for its failure to intervene on behalf of the state whose interests it shares. With it, a state's leader knows that she may face serious consequences if she backs out of her commitment. States and their leaders thus make alliance commitments only to those states whose interests they share and only if they are confident that they will live up to their commitment to their allies in the event of war. Because the precise issues of a crisis and the positions of the contending sides cannot be predicted, it is possible that a state may choose not to intervene despite an alliance and its commitment effects.

United States (Government), the combination of federal, state, and local laws, bodies, and agencies that is responsible for carrying out the operations of the United States. The federal government of the United States is centered in

Definition of the word “resolve,” given by Webster is “to express an opinion or determination by resolution or vote; as ‘it was resolved by the legislature;” It is of similar force to the word “enact,” which is defined by Bouvier as meaning “to establish by law”.

¶4 The legal question to be resolved by the court is whether the word "should"13 in the May 18 order connotes futurity or may be deemed a ruling in praesenti.14 The answer to this query is not to be divined from rules of grammar;15 it must be governed by the age-old practice culture of legal professionals and its immemorial language usage. To determine if the omission (from the critical May 18 entry) of the turgid phrase, "and the same hereby is", (1) makes it an in futuro ruling - i.e., an expression of what the judge will or would do at a later stage - or (2) constitutes an in in praesenti resolution of a disputed law issue, the trial judge's intent must be garnered from the four corners of the entire record.16

[CONTINUES – TO FOOTNOTE]

should. The will to do something or have something take place: I shall go out if I feel like it.

United States of America (USA) [ju:’naitid ‘steits av e’merike] noun independent country, a federation of states (originally thirteen, now fifty in North America; the United States Code = book containing all the permanent laws of the USA, arranged in sections according to subject and revised from time to time COMMENT: the federal government (based in Washington D.C.) is formed of a legislature (the Congress) with two chambers (the Senate and House of Representatives), an executive (the President) and a judiciary (the Supreme Court). Each of the fifty states making up the USA has its own legislature and executive (the Governor) as well as its own l

federal—3. Of or relating to the central government of a federation as distinct from the governments of its member units.

This proves that not all testing is the same---our argument isn’t that the neg should go for racism or sexism good, but exactly the opposite---debate is best when the neg can discuss the relationship between the aff’s harms and its mechanism, which only we allow.

There are two aspects that I would like to address here. Firstly, the notion of demand: making certain demands on the state – say for higher wages, equal rights for excluded groups, to not go to war, or an end to draconian policing – is one of the basic strategies of social movements and radical groups. Making such demands does not necessarily mean working within the state or reaffirming its legitimacy. On the contrary, demands are made from a position outside the political order, and they often exceed the question of the implementation of this or that specific measure. They implicitly call into question the legitimacy and even the sovereignty of the state by highlighting fundamental inconsistencies between, for instance, a formal constitutional order which guarantees certain rights and equalities, and state practices which in reality violate and deny them.

Negative state action that restricts executive power compels the affirmative to criticize the state. This topic builds in aff ground based on Trump and the executive being bad [optional – as well as judicial and legislative failure to check the executive], which solves their offense and provides a meaningful role for the neg.

Debating on the neg solves their offense---half of their debates allow them to challenge the aff’s statist politics which questions the role of the state. Over the course of a year, we could conclude that the state was irredeemable, but we’d come to a more robust conclusion than assuming it from the outset---this proves their interpretation links to our dogmatism offense because it means debaters would never have to give credence to ideas they don’t like.

Topicality excludes content not people---divorcing ballots from subjective positions is good: 1. It prevents neg teams from having to negate personal experience, and instead encourages debates about the utility of refuting aff arguments and 2. It avoids forcing judges to make decisions about debater’s politics and identities which devolves into character assassination.

Voting neg doesn’t literally prevent teams from introducing their arguments---it’s not intent to exclude, it’s an intent to refine. They can still read their affirmative, they should just be prepared to justify the utility of negating it.