I am a professor and author. I use complexity science to examine threats to global security—especially economic instability, environmental stress, ideological polarization, and mass violence—and how people, organizations, and societies can respond to these threats.
WHAT’S NEW
Trump needs a war
Donald Trump needs a war. He needs a war to fire Robert Mueller. Special counsel Mueller oversees an aggressively expanding investigation of Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election...
Who’s the chicken in Trump’s high-stakes game?
U.S. President Donald Trump loves to play chicken – the game of chicken, that is. And while his predilection toward the game is bad enough, it also turns out that he plays it badly, and that’s truly scary.
Crisis analysis: How much damage can Trump do? (A lot)
Trump’s performance so far suggests his administration will lurch from crisis to crisis. To make some sense of these outcomes, I’ve charted the most likely crisis types and their causes.
President Trump Will Make Chaos the New Normal
During the election campaign, Donald Trump made the normalization of abnormality a signature political tactic. The more he violated the conventions of U.S. political life, democratic practice and civil discourse, the more he excited his followers.
How Donald Trump Would Reshape America
with Jack Goldstone | As the great nuclear strategist Herman Kahn once said, to survive we must sometimes think the unthinkable. Never has this advice been more apt, because from the moment Donald Trump announced his run for president of the United States he has been transforming the unthinkable into the thinkable.
Author Sees Early Best-Before Date for Alberta’s Oilsands
by Maurice Smith | Alberta chose the wrong path when it doubled down on the “junk energy” contained in the oilsands in recent years, and must move fast to join the energy transition away from fossil fuels if it hopes to avoid falling off the climate change cliff.
WHAT’S NEW
Alberta’s economic future in peril without shift away from fossil fuel
by Gordon Kent | Alberta needs to start shifting quickly out of the oilsands to avoid serious economic trouble as the world moves away from fossil fuels, a University of Waterloo professor says.
Author Sees Early Best-Before Date for Alberta’s Oilsands
by Maurice Smith | Alberta chose the wrong path when it doubled down on the “junk energy” contained in the oilsands in recent years, and must move fast to join the energy transition away from fossil fuels if it hopes to avoid falling off the climate change cliff.
B.C.’s green shift is a window to the world
In May's provincial election, the Green Party won its first multiple-seat breakthrough in North America, and by a fluke of electoral arithmetic, it now holds the balance of power in the legislature. Today, B.C.'s citizens are exploring uncharted political territory of potentially huge significance to people outside the province.
RESEARCH
Synchronous Failure: The Emerging Causal Architecture of Global Crisis
by Thomas Homer-Dixon et al. | Recent global crises reveal an emerging pattern of causation that could increasingly characterize the birth and progress of future global crises. A conceptual framework identifies this pattern’s deep causes, intermediate processes, and ultimate outcomes.
The Conceptual Structure of Social Disputes: Cognitive-Affective Maps as a Tool for Conflict Analysis and Resolution
Thomas Homer-Dixon et al. | We describe and illustrate a new method of graphically diagramming disputants’ points of view called cognitive-affective mapping. The products of this method—cognitive-affective maps (CAMs)—represent an individual’s concepts and beliefs about a particular subject, such as another individual or group or an issue in dispute.
A Complex Systems Approach to the Study of Ideology: Cognitive-affective Structures and the Dynamics of Belief Change
Thomas Homer-Dixon et al. | We propose a complex systems approach to the study of political belief systems, to overcome some of the fragmentation in the current scholarship on ideology.