Security narratives based on symptom-focused crisis compellence prevent systematic transition---try or die to avert collapse

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).