Failed States and Nation-Building
* Special Issue on Failed States and Nation-Building. By Peter Turchin et al. Cliodynamics, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2012
URL = https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3rt56959
Material from the Evolution Institute’s held working conference on An Evolutionary Approach to the Twin Problems of Failed States and Nation-Building at Stanford University on December 3–5, 2011
Summary
"The rise of a centralized state that commands real authority throughout its territory can be seen as the reverse of the process by which a state loses its authority and gradually crumbles into a ‘failed state.’ A key aspect of state building involves establishing the internal bonds that make it possible for a disparate congery of smaller-scale groups to unite within a larger framework. Both formation of larger social units from smaller ones and its reverse, disintegration, can be productively studied from the perspective of cultural and social evolution. Given the intense interest by policy makers in both state development and disintegration, it is surprising that the many studies addressing the subject have almost always ignored the science of cultural evolution. What explains this puzzling absence? During the twentieth century Social Darwinism became a code word for the justification of social inequality, leading to policies such as genocide, eugenics, and withholding social support for the poor. As a result, the processes governing evolution of societies, groups, and states became a pariah subject, as far as most branches of scholarship devoted to human behavior and culture were concerned. That situation is changing. Nearly every human-related subject is now being approached from an evolutionary perspective, with results reported in the top scientific and academic journals. These results bear no resemblance to Social Darwinist theories of a century ago. They neither paint a grim portrait of human nature as “red in tooth and claw,” nor paint a romantic portrait of an inherently good noble savage. Instead, we see a species capable of the full range of outcomes, depending upon how our genetically evolved dispositions interact with environmental circumstances. Understanding this interaction in detail has enormous potential for informing policies aimed at improving the human condition."