The Edge of Chaos
by David Forrest

It was 11 a.m. on a fine summer morning in Sarajevo, 28 June 1914, when the driver of an automobile carrying two passengers made a wrong turn. The car was not supposed to leave the main street, and yet it did, pulling up into a narrow passageway with no escape. It was an unremarkable mistake, easy enough to make in the crowded, dusty streets. But this mistake, made on this day and by this driver, would disrupt hundreds of millions of lives, and alter the course of world history.

The automobile stopped in front of a 19-year-old Bosnian Serb student, Gavrilo Princip. As a member of the Serbian terrorist organisation Black Hand, Princip couldn’t believe his luck. Striding forward, he reached the car. He drew a small pistol from his pocket. Pointed it. Pulled the trigger twice. Within thirty minutes, the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, the car’s passengers, were dead. Within hours the political fabric of Europe had begun to unravel.

In the days following, Austria used the assassination as an excuse to begin planning an invasion of Serbia. Russia guaranteed protection to the Serbs, while Germany, in turn, offered to intercede on Austria’s behalf should Russia become involved. Within just thirty days, this chain reaction of international threats and promises had mobilized vast armies and tied Austria, Russia, Germany, France, Britain and Turkey into a deadly knot. When the First World War ended five years later, 10 million lay dead. Europe fell into an uncomfortable quiet that lasted twenty years, and then the Second World War claimed another 30 million. In just three decades, the world had suffered two engulfing cataclysms. Was it all due to a chauffeur’s mistake?

So begins the book Ubiquity, written by Mark Buchanan and published last year.

Buchanan argues that history is not directed, predetermined or in any way predictable. Rather, it is capricious, unpredictable and often cataclysmic. Like earthquakes, avalanches, forest fires and the extinction of species, the course of human affairs can take a catastrophic turn without warning. And the trigger is often an apparently insignificant event.

Earthquakes, avalanches, forest fires and extinctions all show a similar mathematical pattern – a power law distribution. When the number of events is plotted against their size on a logarithmic scale, the result is a straight line. In a paper published in 1948, entitled “Variation of the Frequency of Fatal Quarrels with Magnitude,” English physicist Lewis Fry Richardson analyzed international conflicts occurring between 1820 and 1945 and showed that they followed the same pattern. Published posthumously in 1960, his book The Statistics of Deadly Quarrels examined more comprehensive data and came to the same conclusion.

The complex systems associated with these phenomena – wars included – exhibit what is called ‘self-organized criticality.’ They organize themselves into such a state that, even when disturbed only slightly, they can tip suddenly from stability to instability creating a major catastrophic event. The movement of a single grain of sand can set off an avalanche. A spark can ignite a major forest fire. An apparently insignificant action can trigger a global conflict. Such a system is said to exist in a critical state between order and chaos, poised at the ‘edge of chaos.’

If history works this way, then cataclysmic events are inherent in the system itself. But the underlying mechanisms are still unknown. “Neither the ‘web of international relations’ nor the social fabric of any society is a thing easily grasped,” Buchanan says. “Even so, it is probably beyond argument that some form of stress must build up in both. It seems likely as well that as this stress builds, it is not always (or even often) immediately released by ‘adjustments.’ It has to build beyond some threshold before anything changes.”

Lars-Erik Cederman of Harvard University’s John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies has developed a computer model of territorial disputes that replicates Richardson’s results. When a local balance of power is established in the model, across each of the territorial boundaries between states, and no country is ready to launch an attack, the system remains in a state of global equilibrium. This equilibrium is only temporary, however. Even a small disruption can cause the system to become unstable, unleashing a chain of events that resembles the cascading instability of an earthquake, avalanche or forest fire.

Princeton University professor Robert Gilpin suggested such a systems model of conflict in his book War and Change in World Politics, published in 1981. “As a consequence of the changing interest of individual states, and especially because of the differential growth in power among states, the international system moves from a condition of equilibrium to one of disequilibrium,” he said. And he believed that war was a means of releasing built-up tension. “Although resolution of a crisis through peaceful adjustment of the systemic disequilibrium is possible, the principal mechanism of change throughout history has been war, or what we shall call hegemonic war.”

Vanderbilt University professor John Vasquez explains the size of wars in terms of cascading system instability. “An ongoing war,” he said in his book The War Puzzle, published in 1993, “no matter what its initial cause, is likely to change the existing political world of those contiguous to the belligerents, creating new opportunities, as well as threats.”

Cederman believes researchers have largely ignored Lewis Richardson’s work. Yet, he says, “This remarkable finding belongs to the most accurate and robust ones that one is likely to find in world politics.” If the international political system does obey such a natural law, ignoring Richardson’s results is unconscionable. We must work much harder to learn how the system functions and to better understand the mechanisms by which conflict spreads.

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