Since the 2008 financial crash, the world has witnessed an unprecedented outbreak of social unrest in every major continent.

Beginning with the birth of the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring, the eruption of civil disorder continues to wreak havoc unpredictably from Greece to Ukraine, from China to Thailand, from Brazil to Turkey, and beyond. Policymakers and media observers have largely missed the biophysical triggers of this new age of unrest – the end of the age of cheap fossil fuels, and its multiplying consequences for the Earth’s climate, industrial food production, and economic growth.

This scientific monograph for the first time develops an empirically-ground theoretical model of the complex interaction between biophysical processes and geopolitical crises, demonstrated through the analysis of a wide range of detailed case studies of historic, concurrent and probable state failures in the Middle East, Northwest Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Europe and North America. Geopolitical crises across these regions are being driven by the proliferation of climate, food and economic crises which have at their root the common denominator of a fundamental and permanent disruption in the energy basis of industrial civilization.

This inevitable energy transition, which will be completed well before the close of this century, entails a paradigm shift in the organization of civilization. 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. While geopolitics cannot be simplistically reduced to the biophysical, this book shows that international relations today can only be understood by recognizing the extent to which the political is embedded in the biophysical.

Although the book offers a rigorous scientific analysis, it is written in a clean, journalistic style to ensure readability and accessibility to a general audience. It contains a large number of graphical illustrations concerning oil production data, population issues, the food price index, economic growth and debt, and other related issues to demonstrate the interconnections and correlations across key sectors.

 Author

Dr Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is a complex systems social scientist. He is a Distinguished Fellow at the Schumacher Institute for Sustainable Systems, and Executive Director of the System Shift Lab, a system transformation consultancy in London. Previously he was Research Editor and Director of Global Research Communications at the technology forecasting think-tank RethinkX, where he led on strategies to communicate RethinkX’s data-led scientific research to mainstream audiences. Ahmed has taught international politics, contemporary history, empire and globalisation at the University of Sussex’s School of Global Studies – where he obtained his PhD in International Relations and his MA in Contemporary War & Peace Studies – and Brunel University’s Politics & History Unit.