A new book co-edited by SPIA researchers and alumni examines the rise and fall of prior societies and their relation to our own seemingly precarious times.

How Worlds Collapse: What History, Systems, and Complexity Can Teach Us about Our Modern World and Fragile Future (Routledge) presents more than 20 essays from scholars around the world giving readers a wide range of viewpoints and disciplines.

“Everyone writes from their own perspectives,” said Zia Mian, senior research scholar and co-director of SPIA’s Program in Science and Global Security, who contributed a chapter on the nuclear weapons age as a self-destruct system. “That’s what makes it so interesting. … It tells you there is a sense out there in the larger community of scholars about the sense of collective vulnerability that we feel, leading us to ask these questions about collapse.”

A grant from the Office of the Dean of Research supported the formation of Princeton’s Global Collaborative Network on Historical Systemic Collapse, a group of sociologists, scientists, historians, and physicists from around the world who explore the current and future implications of past societal dissolutions, along with the far-reaching impacts of globalization. According to Miguel Centeno, SPIA’s executive vice-dean, the Musgrave Professor of Sociology, and a professor of sociology and international affairs, who led the effort, examining these issues in such a cross-disciplinary way is a novel approach.

“I always have been fascinated by post-apocalyptic movies — a very big genre right now,” said Centeno, a co-editor of How Worlds Collapse. “We wanted to look at this systematically.”

The book’s 25 chapters include an introduction to societal collapse and an explanation of what it entails. More than a dozen case studies of varying types illustrate the concept.

“They are interesting perspectives, including an entomologist explaining the collapse of pollinator colonies, how it really thins out bees,” said Centeno. “They gather less, use reserves, and you get less out of them. After a while, bees, people — they run out of what they need, whatever it may be.”

But what exactly is the failing of a society? Will the average person know it if they are experiencing it? Probably not, the scholars agree. It is not like a movie, where all at once there is a large catastrophic event. Rather, it is a breakdown, characterized by a slow collective decline.

“Collapse is not necessarily everything falls down all at once,” Centeno said. “Holes between parts become more apparent, but other links remain. It is about the parts of a whole not communicating with each other. We were after finding out if (paraphrasing Tolstoy), all failed societies are alike, or if each one fails in its own way”.

Such commonalities, he continued, include, “some basic elite divisions, high levels of inequality, legitimacy concerns, and overuse of the environment,” yet not all societies experiencing them end up falling apart.

“The real question we can’t address is, why do we find societies who by these predicates should be collapsing, but they don’t?” Centeno said. “It is the question of what makes for a resilient society.”

Other contributors agree that basic societal tenets begin to falter over time preceding a collapse. History also tells us that complete societal collapse is not instantaneous, but gradual.

“A problem when looking at past collapses is that there is a tendency to push lots of years into very small sentences,” said John Haldon, the Shelby Cullom Davis ’30 Professor of European History, Emeritus, and a professor of history and Hellenic studies, emeritus. “The collapse of the Roman Empire took 250 years of history and seven to eight generations who lived it. It can’t simply be written in a single sentence. Collapses are complicated, happen in different ways, and to different special extents.”

Oversimplifying the fall of a society is a common tendency, he said, but more significant is to grasp the intricacies and slow changes that led to failure.

“One of the issues is temporality in attitudes, to talk about collapse as if it is a simple thing,” Haldon said. “We miss the phenomenon, the understanding of how and why, and why not in others. The understanding of how those things might affect how we think about the present. We need to understand it better than just seeing it as a Big Bang sort of collapse.”

Understanding history, how systems of societies work, and how they are connected in various ways enables us to understand where we are now and what the future might be. As Mian noted, our current vulnerability is of our own doing – as can be said of prior societies that failed.

“It is a moment of danger because of the systems we as human societies have made, not an external danger,” he said. “Societies did this to themselves; we weren’t paying proper attention to what we were doing to each other and with each other as people, countries, economies, in our relationship to nature, environment and climate, to violence and war, and to the technologies we built. Our societies did things we did not fully understand and could not imagine or meaningfully control.”

The project and subsequent book are not about providing advice or a roadmap to avoid collapse. Rather, the purpose is to garner a greater understanding of the past, to provoke discussion about how and why societies falter or flourish, and to use that knowledge to discover ways to improve current conditions and sidestep future failure.

“We live in times where we think things and systems will just work,” Centeno said. “One of the things we wanted to understand is where does a society have to be before things start collapsing? Will it be depriving people of food, energy, or some kind of legitimacy? You can survive a lot, but the interesting factor not explained by simply material analysis is the level of legitimacy. You have a much higher chance of surviving if people do not question basic mutual understandings.

“People can take what they will from it. It is not about what is right or what is wrong, but what is coming. If we look at all these cases from history and what can we learn from them, then we can choose what to do. We are scholars here to point out options. It is about recognizing potential dangers. Once those are recognized, we need to decide if should we do this or do that. But we have to recognize we might be in trouble.”