Peace and Conflict Studies

Ancient Concerns, Modern Discipline

Peace and Conflict Studies (PCS) and Existential Risk Studies (ERS) are both simultaneously old and new. Concerns about war, peace, and survival are as old as human civilization and, at the same time, have only recently crystallized into distinct fields of research and practice. The history of humanity is often told as the history of conflicts. For example, both the Mahābhārata and Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War were written centuries ago to address the above-mentioned concerns and still have contemporary religious and political influence.

PCS does not have a single definition; there are many camps with different emphases and perspectives. Broadly speaking, these different focuses are security and conflict management, conflict resolution, conflict transformation, applied, and transdisciplinary approaches. What connect these different camps are efforts to understand conflict, violence, and peace. Specifically, PCS examines the causes, dynamics, and effects of different types of conflict and what factors and processes contribute to peace and reduce violence and suffering. In its transdisciplinary nature, PCS draws from Political Science, Philosophy, International Relations (IR), Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology, Religious Studies, Contemplative Traditions, Peace Movements, and our collective history of conflicts and experiences of peace.

The beginning of Peace and Conflict Studies as an academic field is placed at different moments in history by scholars: the founding of the first Peace Studies Program in 1948 at Manchester College in Indiana (Harris et al. 1998); the work of Johan Galtung who is the founder of Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) in 1959 and the Journal of Peace Research in 1964 and his popularization of many foundational ideas in the field such as positive and negative peace, peace research, and structural and cultural violence (Galtung and Fischer 2013a); or the work of Adam Curle and the establishment of the Department of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford in the UK in 1974 (Woodhouse 2010). While these are important moments in the history of the field, rather than definitive founding moments they represent moments in a longer story. Many scholars and practitioners have built the field of PCS. It has been shaped by the movements of history, resulting in an ongoing synthesis of different streams of thought.

The emergence of PCS has its roots in disillusionment with previous ways of understanding conflict and approaches to building peace during World Wars I and II. The Treaty of Versailles marked the end of the World War I at the beginning of the twentieth century. A consensus emerged that new ways of thinking needed to be developed and supported by the founding of institutions to scientifically study the causes of war and how it could be prevented in the future. This resulted in the development of the field of International Relations (IR) to guide newly formed institutions, such as the League of Nations in 1920, the American Institute of International Affairs (later the Council of Foreign Relations), and the British Institute of International Affairs (later the Institute of International Affairs), both in 1922. The aim of the field of IR and the mission of these institutions was to apply a scientific approach to understanding relationships between countries at a global level to prevent another world war. World War I was seen as an aberration in an otherwise peaceful system. It was believed that future global conflicts could be prevented by understanding and managing the relationships between nation-states as they were seen as the primary actors in conflicts and have a monopoly on the use of force (Dietrich 2012). At this time the field of IR was shaped by the competing perspectives of Realism and Idealism. Both voices argued for ways of understanding the world that were not based on religious faith but rather on philosophical assumptions about the nature of humankind, society, and the state.

Despite the lofty aims of trying to understand conflict to prevent another global war, World War II erupted just 21 years later. The failure of the League of Nations to prevent the invasion of Manchuria (1931) and World War II (1939–1945) cast doubt on the ability of theories of International Relations to prevent war. These failures can be understood as the beginning of the disillusionment that arose after World War II. The horrors of the Nazi concentration camps, Soviet gulags, and the use of nuclear weapons fractured the faith in previous ways of understanding conflicts and their ability to deliver on the promise of peace.

The development and use of nuclear weapons were influential factors in the emergence of PCS. The destruction wrought on Hiroshima and Nagasaki became, to many, a symbol of the inevitable conclusion of devotion to modern thinking and the destructive potential that technology could bring, and the mistrust of the systems of governance that wield that power. Further, the voices of those in the scientific community concerned with these developments became an important force in the development of PCS throughout the 1940s–1950s. These voices came together in the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, which is regarded as the “impulse document for peace studies as a discipline” (Dietrich 2012, 181). This manifesto, authored by Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, and nine other scientists,Footnote 1 warns of the disastrous potential ramifications of the use of Hydrogen Bombs and calls for humanity to decide against armed conflict. It was published in July of 1955 at the beginning of the nuclear arms race and was a radical call for nuclear disarmament on all sides.

The Russell-Einstein Manifesto gave rise to the Pugwash movement beginning in 1957, with many of the signatories to the Russell-Einstein Manifesto becoming prominent Pugwashites. The creation of the Pugwash movement was also supported by the newly formed Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (the Bulletin), whose co-founders include scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, and Hans Bethe. The Bulletin is a nonprofit organization that seeks to educate fellow scientists about atomic weapons, especially the connections between their scientific work and national and international politics. An additional aim of the Bulletin is to educate US citizens about the potential risks posed by nuclear energy in its application to warfare. They are also the keepers of the Doomsday Clock, an artistic metaphor for the dangers and urgency posed by manmade threats to humanity.

Since its creation, the Pugwash movement has become a series of international conferences and workshops. In these spaces, scientists come together to discuss questions of global security, armed conflict, nuclear weapons, and other weapons of mass destruction and the responsibility of those working in the sciences with regard to working for war or peace. Some of the most noteworthy accomplishments of this movement were the nuclear test ban in 1963, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, and the ban on chemical and nuclear weapons in 1972 (Kraft et al. 2018). In 1995 the Pugwash movement was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to commemorate these accomplishments (Nobel Prize Outreach 2022).

From these initial foundations, the field of Conflict Resolution began in earnest at the height of the Cold War between 1950 and 1960. People came together from different disciplines concerned about escalating geopolitical tensions, the nuclear arms race, and the specter that war between superpowers could threaten human survival. These pioneers recognized a common vision in developing rigorous and scientifically grounded approaches to studying conflict. Early systems theories by Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Anatol Rapoport, Ralph Gerard, Kenneth Boulding, and Elise Boulding brought cross-disciplinary perspectives and methods to the field of Peace Studies as it developed in the USA. The multidimensional approaches developed from their early work were built on a radically different starting point than previous ways of understanding conflict. Their approach was based on the observation that the vast majority of all social conflict occurs nonviolently and that the minority of human activity is related to war. From this perspective, researching peace requires an understanding built from peace rather than conflict, war, or violence (Dietrich 2012).

In the 1980s, the Harvard Negotiation Project popularized, particularly through Fisher and Ury’s Getting to Yes (1981), many of the principles of negotiation and mediation, such as separating people from problems and distinguishing between interests and positions. These approaches shaped interventions in the struggle to end Apartheid in South Africa, developing problem-solving workshops to support peace processes in the Middle East and taking community-oriented approaches to resolving conflict in Northern Ireland. Additionally, many development and humanitarian agencies, particularly in Africa and Southeast Asia, began to focus on understanding conflict and mainstream Conflict Resolution as an essential component of their activities (Ramsbotham et al. 2016).

Another important development in PCS was the UN Security General Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s “An Agenda for Peace: Preventative Diplomacy, Peacemaking, and Peace-Keeping” (1992), which marked the changing nature of conflict in the global political system at the end of the Cold War. The inception of the Agenda for Peace was a request made by the UN Security Council for an analysis of and recommendations for strengthening the practices of peacemaking and peacekeeping in light of these political changes and of recent failures that had made the flaws in peacekeeping practices increasingly visible. The Agenda for Peace outlines how the UN should respond to conflicts in the new post-Cold War era. Among the key points of the document was the establishment of methods of preventive diplomacy that could be used before or during peacekeeping operations. It also defined and differentiated between peacemaking and peacekeeping. Further, it introduced and defined the concept of “post-conflict peacebuilding.”

Conflict Management, Conflict Resolution, and Conflict Transformation

The field of PCS is often subdivided into different approaches of Conflict Management, Conflict Resolution, and Conflict Transformation. Even though these perspectives have developed over time, they should not be understood as a linear development or mutually exclusive perspectives. These approaches can be differentiated by their answers to five foundational questions.

Human nature: What is the view of human nature at the core of this approach? Are humans inherently violent or peaceful, or is our nature ambivalent?

The nature of conflict: What is conflict, why does it happen, and what function does it serve?

The primary actor: According to this perspective, who is the ideal actor to work in conflicts?

Method of peace work: What is the main approach for working on conflict from this perspective?

The goal of peace work: From this perspective, what is the overall aim of peace work?

Conflict Management approaches are built on the assumption that conflict is inherent in human nature and cannot be avoided, and thus, the most logical approach for working with conflict is to try to prevent or manage it. Peace work, in this understanding, is left to those actors (usually nation-states) powerful enough to manage other parties’ conflict.

Conflict Resolution approaches take an ambiguous view of human nature where we are neither inherently prone to violence nor peace. They posit instead that conflicts arise through a lack of understanding and communication. This approach involves skilled neutral meditators who engage with conflicting parties to come to an official resolution to the “problem” of conflict through a better understanding of themselves and a clearer ability to communicate with the other.

Conflict Transformation starts from the same ambiguous view of human nature and takes a different view of the nature of conflict, which is understood to be a fundamental driver of transformation and change. Conflicts occur at all levels, from the individual to the global, and result from the relational dynamics among those involved in the conflict. Thus, the task of the peace worker is to operate as a facilitator, seeking to guide transformational processes in the relationships present in the conflict to reduce violence and build peace.

Approaches to Conflict Transformation are further subdivided into prescriptive and elicitive approaches. These terms refer to “ideal types” of approaches, and in real life, a pure version of either is likely not to exist. In a prescriptive approach, a peace worker, here imagined in the role of a trainer, is understood as an expert, and the training event is conceptualized around the transmission of their specialized knowledge and experience to the participants. The goal of the encounter is the mastery of a piece of knowledge, or a set of skills, where the participants try to emulate the expert’s work. The concept of Elicitive Conflict Transformation was introduced into PCS in the 1990s to expand approaches to the understanding of the dynamics of peace and conflict. This approach seeks to draw out, or elicit, existing knowledge about how conflicts are addressed by a specific group of people in a specific time and place. This approach then facilitates the catalyzation of these existing practices of dealing with conflict to guide a transformation process between individuals, groups, and communities. In an elicitive approach, the peace worker is understood as a process facilitator, rather than an expert trainer. The process is aimed at the discovery, creation, and rarefication of models of understanding that come from the participants in the encounter, who are seen as vital resources for grounded contextual knowledge. The facilitator functions as a catalyst, holding and guiding the process whereby those involved determine the outcomes (Lederach 2015).

With changes in the understanding of peace work, there have been subsequent changes in how timescales are viewed when working for peace. Conflict Management approaches have the narrowest timescale, focusing on discrete episodes of conflict and developing power-based strategies to reach a formal agreement. Conflict Resolution approaches expand the temporal view by seeking to understand the deeper root causes of the conflict, and come to solutions that build a more sustainable peace. Conflict Transformation approaches paradoxically hold both the narrowest and the farthest-reaching view of time, integrating a multigenerational perspective on approaches to transforming systems of relationships with the importance of a focus on the present moment with the people in the room. Peace scholar, John Paul Lederach, calls this balancing act the 200-year present (Lederach 2005).

Many forces have continued to shape the field of Peace and Conflict Studies. Globalization has had a host of influences including increasing access to information on conflicts around the world, the expansion of identities that reach further than they have before while at the same time contributing in some cases to more localized identities. Shifts in the geopolitical order, particularly by the USA which has come to think of itself as the leader in a monopolar world, have had a significant impact on International Relations. The nature of war has shifted from warfare between professional militaries of nation-states to hybrid wars fought with a mixture of state and nonstate forces. These wars are often fought for goals that are different from the past, with more attention to identity issues over ideology (Kaldor 2012).

Defining Peace and Conflict Studies

A precise definition of Peace and Conflict Studies is difficult to articulate beyond the tautological “peace and conflict studies” is the “study of peace and conflict.” Nonetheless, there are some core definitional criteria for the field. A critical analysis of the key terms of peace, conflict, and violence has been deemed appropriate and necessary. As the field has developed, many voices have been brought into this discussion, adding further depth and nuance. Whatever is meant by peace is an incomplete understanding if it is defined only as the absence of violence (Galtung and Fisher 2013b). The conditions that need to be present for there to be peace are at the heart of the field.

Some generally agreed-upon characteristics can describe the field: PCS has roots in a postmodern field of study fueled by disillusionment with the grand explanatory narrative. The field tends to cast a critical eye on how peace and conflict issues are understood. PCS is transdisciplinary, drawing from and transcending the disciplinary boundaries of many fields (Political Science, International Relations, Philosophy, Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology, Religious Studies, peace movements, our collective history of conflicts, and experiences of peace). It is also multilevel in that while International Relations had an explicit focus on elite-level actors, governments, and militaries and sought to find strategies to prevent war at the nation-state level, PCS took an expanded view on who can work to prevent violence and build peace. PCS is multicultural. While a clear influence of particular cultures and places shaped its origins as a field, as it has grown and developed, increasing attention has been placed on bringing experiences from different cultures, religions, ethnicities, sexes, genders, and sexual orientations into its theory and methodology. The field is analytical, seeking to utilize various methods and frames to understand the nature and dynamics of peace, conflict, and violence. PCS is also a normative discipline. Similar to medicine, few doctors would think of themselves as neutral. They are on the side of the patient seeking a particular outcome. PCS maintains a clear bias toward reducing violence and increasing peace. Finally, PCS emphasizes the linkage between theory and practice. Effective peace work and research depend on each other for their validity. The efficacy of peace work is important because the subjects of research are the lives of people.

State of the Art

The state of the art in PCS is growing and changing. There are a few key trends that define PCS that are particularly relevant to the topic of the long-term survival of humanity and peace. The early history of PCS as a defined field of inquiry was characterized by disillusionment with previous approaches to dealing with the problem of conflict. The further development of this field has followed this essential motivation, taking what has been learned through successes and failures, and going beyond the confines of previous approaches. At the same time, the changing nature of violent conflict has also necessitated changes in theory and practice. One set of interpretations traces the development of peace thinking through the “Liberal Peace” and posits different ideas for what comes next.

Here liberal peace refers to an understanding of peacebuilding that emerged after the end of the Cold War. It focuses on the importance of “external interventions that are intended to reduce the risk that a State will erupt into or return to war” (Barnett et al. 2007, 37). There is a consensus that this type of liberal peacebuilding rests on the principles of democratization and the liberalization of markets (O.P. Richmond 2011, 2015). A precondition for sustainable peace is that a wide range of social, economic, and institutional reforms must be put in place to support these principles and ensure the presence of a strong system of democratic politics. This understanding and approach to peace have shown their limitations, and much of the research in contemporary PCS is attempts to go beyond this initial understanding. What lies beyond a liberal peace has variously been termed “Post-liberal Peace” (O.P. Richmond 2011, Richmond and Mitchell 2012), “Hybrid Peace” (O.P. Richmond 2015; Mac Ginty and Richmond 2015), “Everyday Peace” (Mac Ginty 2014, 2021), and “Transrational Peace” (Dietrich 2012, 2013, 2017, 2021). Within these different conceptions are key themes of complexity (de Coning 2016, 2018; von Bertalanffy 1972), systems thinking (CDA 2016; Gallo 2012; Ropers 2008), and resilience (de Coning 2016, 2018; Cote and Nightingale 2011).

The term “hybrid peace” has been used to describe a Post-liberal Peace and refers to the complex and multileveled dynamics of peace that straddles the local to the international. A hybrid piece is observed at the in-betweens, at the intersections of local understandings and practices of peace and the national and international norms that guide and govern international relations and development. These kinds of peace first emerge in the tension of the opposition between the local and the international until some kind of accommodation and, at least, a tacit agreement is reached that this kind of peace and those actors who work toward building and maintaining it have legitimacy at both local and international levels (O.P. Richmond 2015; Mac Ginty 2014). Attempts at moving toward this kind of hybridity are found in the Agenda for Peace, the Millennium Development Goals, and the Responsibility to Protect doctrine.

The concept of “Everyday Peace” is one of these hybrid turns which focuses peace research on the everyday practices that individuals and groups use to navigate their dynamics when society is deeply divided. The rationale for coining the term is to designate a more human-focused and vernacular approach to understanding experiences of peace and conflict. Examples of these practices of everyday peace range from coping mechanisms, such as avoiding hot topics in mixed company, concealing identities, rituals of politeness, concern with ascertaining the social identifications of others, to deferring blame to those outside of the context. This everyday peace is the bottom-up organizations of local agency in conflict-affected societies that are mechanisms and practices that address grievance, conflict, and difference in ways that allow communities to live together. Though, at first glance, this conception of peace may seem to be conflict avoidance by a different name, these strategies often overlap into a complex system that is aimed at survival through minimizing risk while potentially building the ground and necessary calm for gradually working on the differences that have led to the conflict (Mac Ginty 2014).

Another future development in PCS follows a different line in understanding peace that does not follow through a progression from “liberal” to “post-liberal.” The “transrational approach” developed by Wolfgang Dietrich in his “Many Peaces Tetralogy”Footnote 2 takes a different history and vision of peace. Dietrich identifies his approach as “Transrational Peace Philosophy.” This perspective’s origin is two-fold. An understanding of peace requires a perceiving subject to have meaning. It thus is more accurate to describe peace in the plural, as “peaces” than as a single “peace.” Even though this can, and does, on one level, suggest that there are as many interpretations of peace as perceiving subjects, it is possible to group understandings of peace into general categories. These categories he describes as “peace families,” denoting the fuzzy delineations between different groups of interpretations of peace. This type of categorization also suggests that although these different families have developed over time, one should not read it in an evolutionary sense where one perspective excludes the other. These peace families are the energetic, moral, modern, postmodern, and transrational (Dietrich 2012, 2013).

The energetic peace family comprises immanent understandings of peace rooted in the human perception of dualities: hot and cold, dark and light, wet and dry. The core value of this understanding of peace is the striving to unite these dualities, not into a final state but a balance of homeostatic equilibrium. Energetic peace is peace out of harmony (Dietrich 2012, 2013).

The moral peace family begins with the same perception of duality but draws different conclusions by positing an ultimate transcendent point outside the experience of imminence. Since this point is situated outside the world of experience, it becomes the referent for ethical rulings and the establishment of norms. Here peace becomes a gift given to the good by a creator God. Moral peace is peace out of justice (Dietrich 2012, 2013).

The modern peace family is structurally similar to the moral. The norms that govern human relations are interpreted through a transcendental referent point, but this point becomes a secular one. God is replaced by Reason, and the world is reduced to the material and understood as mechanical. Visions of a utopia on earth replace the promise of a paradise in the afterlife if we are just rational enough. Since this view of the world only validates what can be seen, held, and measured, those same valuable things can be taken away. This becomes a call for defense, and the modern understanding of peace becomes peace through security (Dietrich 2012, 2013).

These modern peaces are those that lost their draw after the horrors of World War II had revealed what unbridled devotion to rational progress could bring. This wounding of the story that was once held to be true resulted in disillusionment and disenchantment with all grand narratives that claimed explanatory power on who we are as a people, where we are going, and how we should get there. With this collapse of the orienting narratives, the question of truth, or rather truths, became paramount in the postmodern peace family (Dietrich 2012, 2013).

The transrational peace family is named because this perceptive acknowledges that human beings possess rational faculties but that we are so much more than those. The term “transrational” is used because this perceptive applies the rationality of modern science, while, at the same time, transgressing its limits to embrace the entire sphere of human nature and experience. A transrational perspective of peace integrates subjective experiences of harmony, behavioral understanding of security, cultural considerations of truth, and social perceptions of justice. These four elements do not constitute discreet parts of an overarching singular understanding of a transrational peace but rather a dynamic and contextualized peace. As a research practice, a transrational approach focuses on encounters, relationships, and communication styles—understanding humans as “contact boundaries at work” (Dietrich 2012, 2013, 2017).

As understandings of peace and conflict have developed, complexity has become a central component in describing the dynamics of conflict and, in response, systems thinking and resilience as two concepts to guide the development of conflict transformation and peacebuilding initiatives.

Complexity here refers to a few key qualities of a system. The first is the existence of emergent properties that are qualitative of a system that is only made manifest at certain thresholds of complexity. This implies that a system cannot be best understood in a reductionist manner, where the complex system is reduced to the sum of its parts, but rather that a system needs to be understood as more than the sum of its parts. The second quality of a complex system pertaining to peace and conflict is the functioning of non-linear dynamics. The system components do not necessarily have a direct relationship to each other, but rather, interact in complex modulated forms of feedback. Finally, all systems have an inherent tendency to seek a homeostatic equilibrium. In a conflict system, this often shows up as a form of self-organization where the complex system itself seeks to regulate itself without an outside agent inputting energy into the system (de Coning 2016).

As a result of recognizing complexity as a core element of conflict, systems thinking has become an increasingly vital tool in peace research and practice. This development is related to several reasons. First, both conflicts and the actors responsible for addressing them have become increasingly more complex. Second, advancements in peace theory and conflict analysis have shown that the dynamics of conflict are more complex than previously thought. And finally, the understanding of what the overall goal is for working with conflict has evolved from signing a peace agreement to solving the root problems, to working on building relationships that foster a more sustainable peace.

Systems thinking, briefly stated, is a perspective that came about as a reaction to prevailing tendencies in scientific thinking, which focused on deconstructing complex wholes in order to better understand them through their parts. Instead, a systems perspective argues that, especially for complex phenomena, it is equally if not more important to focus on the whole system as the whole is more than the sum of its parts. A systems perspective focuses on understanding complex networks of relationships and the dynamics of feedback loops within a system. This perspective also includes an expanded view of time, recognizing that the complexities of a system are dynamics, and their effects are seen on different timescales. It also recognizes that systems are often characterized by complex, rather than linear, relationships between cause and effect, and overall emergent phenomena are unique to different levels of complexity within the system. Lastly, a system perspective also recognizes that it is perspective-dependent, and thus it is a map that will never be the territory (Ropers 2008).

The advantage of incorporating a systems perspective in peace research and practice is that it provides an increased ability to grasp the complexity of the system of interest. In particular, this kind of perspective helps shed light on the deeper dynamics of conflict intractability and provides an approach for understanding the difficulties encountered by peace processes. A systems perspective offers flexibility and creativity as a tool for conflict analysis and intervention design. In most cases, the ability of any peacebuilding or conflict transformation organization to change an actor or organization in a conflict is extremely unlikely. However, by shifting the perspective from actors to relationships, a systems approach can highlight which relationship, if focused on, stands the best chance of producing the desired change in the system. Further, an asset of a systems approach is that it is not possible to be working on a system of conflict and not be part of it; this helps to situate the individual or the organization into the system they are working on, often assisting in revealing implicit assumptions and moving implicit understanding to explicit knowledge (Coleman 2006; CDA Collaborative Learning Projects 2016).

The use of complexity theory and systems thinking in PCS has highlighted the importance of the concept of resilience. Though the concept has existed for a long time in different fields, it has recently become an important topic for academics and practitioners, especially to imagine peace work beyond the failings of liberal peace (Juncos and Joseph 2020). A resilience approach to peacebuilding and conflict transformation can have several interrelated meanings. At its basic level, drawing from understandings of resilience from ecology, it can be understood as “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while changing to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedback” (Walker et al. 2004). When adapted to PCS, resilience can be understood as the capacity to recover from, or diminish, the effects of violent shocks and stressors on the system to maintain an overall state of peace (van Metre and Calder 2016). More specifically, concerning Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding approaches, resilience can be understood as a group’s capacity to transform conflictive relationships into sources of change, growth, and adaptation, rather than let the conflicts manifest as violent episodes. This capacity can be referenced at the horizontal level, that is, between individuals and groups, and on the vertical level between the people and the state.

Applying systems thinking and complexity theory to conflicts has led to an increased focus on resilience in peace research. Resiliency is the emergent and self-organized capacity for complex systems to balance, adapt, and evolve after a disruption. A systems perspective is necessary to see how resiliency arises, not due to any specific component of the system, but as a result of the system as a whole (Capra 1983). A resilient system is more likely to handle acute shocks to the system and prolonged stresses. The fragility of a system can be understood as a lack of sufficient resiliency in the system (de Coning 2016). When considered in the context of a violent conflict, a resilient society is one where the quality of the relational dynamics, meaning-making systems, and economic and political institutions can maintain a dynamic equilibrium of harmony, truth, justice, and security to ensure the disruptions from the violent episodes can be absorbed, sustained, and transformed with integrity and coherence.

A focus on resilience can be a challenge to liberal peacebuilding perspectives. If a social system is considered in its complexity, it cannot be approached in the rather mechanist view of many peacebuilding approaches where international actors come from outside the system to build peace from above. If sustainable peace is understood in terms of resiliency, then an appropriate peacebuilding approach would seek to facilitate the capacity of a society to self-organize and adapt to a high enough degree to transform the shocks and adapt to the stressors.

Already some of the paradoxes in PCS have started to emerge. If everything is connected in a complex set of relationships, where is the line drawn between the local and the international? Even if this line is disambiguated, how can international actors outside of a conflict do anything to help contribute to peace in another place? Especially because one could take a systems-complexity view on resiliency to mean that any external interference could be detrimental to the emergence of the self-organizing capacity of the system to adapt. If this is the case, then is it best to do nothing? How to approach these questions and their underlying tensions are at the vanguard of the current state of the art in peacebuilding and conflict transformation and has direct links with the field of existential risk.

“Adaptive Peacebuilding” has been proposed as an approach to working toward peace from a perspective informed by “complexity, resilience and local ownership” (de Coning 2018, 5). In this way of thinking, if complex systems cope with changes in the environment by evolving in tandem with it, so too, then should peace theory and practice. The core frame of application should of process facilitation, similar to Elicitive Conflict Transformation. In a peacebuilding context, a Theory of Change needs to be made explicit in a partnership between external actors and local stakeholders, laying out a hypothesis of which series of actions are likely to lead to the desired outcome. These interventions are monitored and evaluated, both about their intended and unintended consequences. After a given time, those affected by the programs and those who designed the interventions decide together which ones should continue, allowing for a type of natural selection process. The learning results then need to be disseminated as broadly as possible within the system, so other initiatives can integrate this information into their theory-planning-action-reflection cycle. The external actors then use the finding to frame the processes that they facilitate in ways that foster the capacity for self-organization and thus the strengthening of resilience (de Coning 2018).

Concerns about peace and conflict are ancient. The academic study of the causes and dynamics of conflict and the nature and conditions of peace is new. Born from a fusion of our collective experiences of peace and conflict with the specific historical context of the end of World War II, the field of Peace and Conflict Studies emerged. It holds a set of overlapping objectives: to explore different understandings of what peace is or could be, to learn from previous conflicts and all the moments where violence did not happen, and to envision new ways of relating to each other. At its core, PCS is about how the energetic potential in conflicts can be transformed into an engine for change rather than a source of violence.

Existential Risk Studies

The understanding of the concept of risk has changed over time. As a concept, risk is likely traced back to prehistoric times and was thought of in terms of danger. To frame the discussion of the field of Existential Risk Studies, I will first touch on the development of the notion of risk as it is currently used in English. From there, I will highlight some of the historical shifts that were necessary for the idea of humanity’s extinction to emerge. I will then discuss a brief history of ERS.

The contemporary understanding of the concept of risk dates back roughly a thousand years. Dr. Karla Mallette, a professor of Italian and Mediterranean Studies at the University of Michigan, traces, in her article “How 12th-Century Genoese Merchants Invented the Idea of Risk” (2021), the origin of the concept of “risk” in Western Europe through its Latin cognate resicum to the twelfth century. The term referred to the Mediterranean practice of splitting the profits between ship captains and investors at the end of a successful shipping journey. It was necessary because the law forbade usury, so the resicum was considered a bonus paid to investors. Historians believe that resicum is derived from a much older Arabic word al-rizq, a Quranic Arabic word that refers to god’s provision for creation. In its contemporary English usages, risk, both as a noun and as a verb, carries connotations of the possibility of loss, danger, or injury (Oxford University 2010; Merriam-Webster 2016)

Contemporary usage of the term “risk” has often been used to help estimate the probability of loss in a given venture or in reference to safety when assessing the probability of danger. When the qualifier “existential” is included in the concept of risk, it draws on those elements of “loss, danger, or injury.” It scales those concerns to the level of existence itself. In the field of Existential Risk Studies (ERS), existential risks are those that “threaten the destruction of humanity's long-term potential” (Ord 2020, 6) or “threaten the extinction of intelligent life on earth” (Bostrom 2013, 15). Global catastrophic risks is a closely related concept referring to those risks that “have the potential to inflict serious damage to human well-being on a global scale” (Bostrom and Ćirković 2011, 1). These risks, despite being severe, do not necessarily threaten all human existence. Put differently, all existential risks are global catastrophic risks, but not all global catastrophic risks are existential risks. The nuances in these distinctions and their importance in studying these risks will be discussed in this chapter.

The systematic study of these risks is a new academic field, and the precise terminology has not yet been standardized. This book will follow the convention used by Simon Beard and Phil Torres (2020) of using the term “Existential Risk Studies” (ERS) as an umbrella term covering topics of existential risks and global catastrophic risks, as well as the research that focuses on understanding the nature and dynamics of these risks (Existential Risk Research) as well as the research on what can be done about these risks (Existential Risk Mitigation) (2).

Humanity’s Destruction—Thinking About the End

Concerns about the ultimate fate of the world and humanity are both an ancient concern and a newly crystalizing field of study. Eschatology, derived from the Greek eschatos meaning the “study of the final end of things, the ultimate resolution of the entire creation” (Walls 2008, 4), has long been the domain of religious speculation and finds its expression in many of humanity’s oldest stories. Stories of past endings pervade mythology and religious texts. The preponderance of flood myths across the world points to this fact. Stories from the Hebrew texts of Noah, the Sumerian Ziusudra, the Greek Deucalion, and the Indian Manu all tell a similar tale—the world has become corrupt; therefore, a great flood comes to end the world, to literally wash it away and mark the beginning of a new, better world (Dundes 1988).

Another end story is found in the Vaishnavite Hindu tradition where time is cyclical and divided into four yugas. A complete set of yugas spans approximately 4.32 billion years. As the cycle of time progresses through the yugas, there is a marked decline in the goodness of life. This decline progresses until the final and current Kali Yuga, where Kalki, the tenth and final avatar of the God Vishnu, comes into being (Dalal 2011). Seated on a white horse with a flaming sword, Kalki dissolves the remnants of the world, after which existence enters a phase of rest known as pralaya, after which the world is reborn into a golden age the cycle repeats (McFarland 2009; Dalal 2011).

The Book of Revelation in the Christian bible also depicts the end of times. It tells a narrative that begins with a warning to heed the author’s words to survive the apocalypse. The book describes a vision of Jesus encouraging the faithful to continue to believe in him even when they are being persecuted. God then reveals that seven seals will be opened, and with each seal will come disasters—rivers of blood and plagues. Chaos continues to spread until a final judgment happens and the faithful will ascend into the kingdom of heaven (Resseguie 2020).

This fascination with “the end” continues today. Post-apocalyptic dystopia has its own genre of film. The Hunger Games (Ross 2012; Lawrence 2013, 2014, 2015), The Matrix (Wachowskis 1999, 2003a, b), World War Z (2013), Mad Max: Fury Road (Miller 2015), and The Book of Eli (Huges and Huges 2010) are movies that all are built upon apocalypse or post-apocalyptic themes and have grossed between $94.4 and $424.67 million each (IMDB 2016). The popularity of the apocalypse in the collective imagination may be a retelling of old myths in a new medium or may be a means by which fiction is used to process collective fears and insecurities about the present and the future. The apocalyptic narrative in film or print reassures the audience that there might still be meaning in the face of such a horrible proposition. The ongoing curiosity with “the end” indicates its importance in human thought.

It is worth noting that even though the notion of apocalypse seems to have perennially occupied our collective consciousness, in these tellings, the story does not end. Some “things” survive most of the “great flood” myths; the end of the Kali Yuga ushers in a rebirth of the universe, and a subsequent golden age, and monotheistic “final judgments” still purport a transcendental plane after the end of time. In Hollywood movies, the crisis is usually averted in some way by the hero. Even in the edgier domains of speculative and science fiction, the stories rarely end with the absolute extinction of earth-originating intelligent life. After all, such an ending would not be a compelling narrative because humans are the audience for this media. Considering the possible reality of our own extinction does seem to be relatively new.

Pondering the possibilities of human extinction, how it might happen, and what might be able to be done about it is the task of Existential Risk Studies (ERS). ERS takes a secular approach grounded in a scientific worldview and builds models on the laws of nature, observations of human behavior, and statistical probability. The “end” that is the subject of investigation ranges from complete extinction of the human species to a societal collapse on such a scale and magnitude that there would be no hope of getting anywhere back to where we once were.

The Emergence of Existential Risk Studies

The development of ERS shares some similarities with the origins of PCS. Both fields arose following scientific revelations that the existence of humanity could be threatened and, further, that it may be threatened by the ways in which humans act, organize, and govern themselves. Simon Beard and Phil Torres’ article “Ripples on the Great Sea of Life: A Brief History of Existential Risk Studies” (2020) provides an overview of the development of ERS organized as developing through three interrelated waves of thought. The emergence of these waves was dependent upon a few essential precursors.

These antecedents illustrate that while the possibility of an apocalypse is not a new idea, the possibility of human extinction is. Beard and Torres argue that the general realization that humanity could become extinct required four main events. The first two of these events are connected to relatively recent scientific discoveries in the natural sciences and the acceptance of those findings. In 1815, the French Zoologist Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) published his Essay on the Theory of the Earth which helped to convince the scientific community that not only is it possible for species to go extinct, but it has happened many times throughout history (Cuvier 2009). The second of these discoveries was that humanity is, in fact, part of the natural order of the biological world. The acceptance of this idea was driven by the publication of Charles Darwin’s, On the Origin of Species (Darwin 1859). At this point in history, acceptance was growing that humans are a species like any other and that species have and can become extinct. Added to these discoveries was the gradual secularization of thought beginning in the 1960s. Eschatology moved out from the sole purview of religious and theological discussions into other fields of study. Finally, witnessing the use of nuclear weapons and the knowledge in the 1980s that a nuclear winter may be possible and would pose a grave threat to humanity gave the scientific community a kill switch, a mechanism by which the extinction of humanity, by our own hands, is possible (Beard and Torres 2020).

Beard and Torres (2020) identify two driving forces that build upon these precursors and set the stage for the emergence of ERS. The first of these forces is speculative fiction, where some of the earliest thoughts about human extinction can be found. Authors such as Lord Byron (1788–1824), Mary Shelley (1797–1851), Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville (1746–1805), Alexander Winchell (1824–1891), Jules Verne (1827–1905), and H.G. Wells (1866–1946) brought the notion of human extinction into the public imagination through their now well-known novels. The second force, and similar to the development of PCS, was the communities of concerned scientists that emerged after World War II, primarily in response to the use of nuclear weapons. Their concern found its most effective articulation in the already mentioned Russel-Einstein Manifesto of 1955 which led to the establishment of the Pugwash Conferences and their work on addressing weapons of mass destruction and other threats to the globe (Beard and Torres 2020).

The publication of Nick Bostrom’s paper “Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards” (2002) is often noted as the beginning of ERS as a field of study. Bostrom is a Professor of Philosophy at Oxford University and the founding Director of the Future of Humanity Institute. Bostrom’s work set the stage for the first wave of ERS, defined by its dual philosophical foundations of Transhumanism and Utilitarianism. Transhumanism is the belief that humanity can, and should, evolve beyond its physical and mental limits through scientific and technological interventions (Bostrom 2008). Total Utilitarianism is a philosophical position that maintains that ethical acts are those that increase the total prosperity in the universe. This logic scales as the human population increases. The more people there are, the greater number of people can experience well-being. Estimates of how many potential future humans there could vary wildly due to the starting assumptions and definitions used in the calculation. If humanity remains as it currently is and stays on earth, Carl Sagan estimated that there could be upwards of 500 trillion future humans (Sagan 1983). If humans were to colonize the galaxy, Milan Ćirković estimates that the Virgo Supercluster would be able to support approximately 1010 future humans (2002). Bostrom (2003) extends these calculations further, estimating that if a posthuman state of being (e.g., in a simulation) is considered, then there could be upwards of 1038 future humans in our supercluster per century (Beard and Torres 2020).

This first-wave ERS has a teleological momentum toward a type of techno-utopia. This future utopia would be inhabited by beings that, very likely, would be quite unlike ourselves. Proponents of this wave of ERS placed the emphasis of their hope and faith in technology, particularly artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology, to lead humanity into a type of posthuman state where the divisions between the physical, virtual, mechanical, and biologic blur.

This utopia is seen as our cosmic potential, and any failure to achieve it would doom countless future humans (biological or otherwise) to nonexistence. To this end, Bostrom coined a type of guiding principle, which became known as the “Maxipok rule,” which states that one should “maximize the probability of an okay outcome, where an okay outcome is any outcome that avoids existential disaster” (Bostrom 2002, 8). This type of approach can be understood as “etiological,” where the focus of the inquiry is on individual existential risks according to their cause. By drawing logical connections between an existential risk and its likely cause, scholars seek to determine interventions to mitigate the risk. This type of methodological approach is most effective if there are a small number of factors that would bring about the catastrophe that can progress in a more or less straightforward manner (Beard and Torres 2020).

The second generation of ERS built on this foundational work and incorporated many aspects of the Effective Altruism (EA) movement. With this integration of EA thinking, the importance of Transhumanism was less emphasized (Beard and Torres 2020). The question at the heart of the EA movement is how to do as much good as possible for the greatest number of people possible. This central ethos shapes the priority of the EA movement to an explicit focus on the long-term future. There are many more possible people in the future. Thus, if you want to maximize the total amount of good done for the most amount of people, then a focus on the long-term future is essential. In the EA logic, this long-term perspective has been neglected in efforts to do good in the world. When assessing how to do good in the world while reducing existential risk, a long-term time horizon implies that even small decreases in existential risks could save millions or billions of lives. This emphasis on looking to improve the long-term future has led to the second wave of ERS to eschew the narrow threat-based approaches in favor of broader strategies to reduce risk such as the reduction of poverty and improving education (Beard and Torres 2020).

Beard and Torres (2020) point toward a newly emerging third wave of ERS primarily defined by its movement away from analyzing risks based on their most direct cause (what they call the etiological approach) to an increased emphasis on ethical pluralism. In this expanded perspective on understanding existential risks, the larger systems of causes and contexts that lead to risks must be understood. This approach also places emphasis on increasing the number and diversity of viewpoints that help define and classify existential risks and devise methods for their study. The third-wave approaches generally favor a systems perspective that embraces the complex systems that give rise to existential risks as emergent phenomena and are subjected to systems of feedback loops. A systems perspective brings the importance of including vulnerabilities and exposures into the existential calculus of existential risks (Beard and Torres 2020).

By acknowledging and embracing complexity, third-wave approaches seek to shift attention to epistemically messy scenarios in which the links between cause and effect are not immediately obvious. This type of perspective is well-suited for addressing issues such as climate change and loss of biodiversity within the context of existential risks. Scholars following these approaches also have placed the importance on including discussions of medium-term risks in the ERS scholarship. Third-wave approaches also move away from utilitarian ethics. An existential catastrophe would be negative not because humanity would not fulfill its technological utopian destiny, as first-wave approaches hold dear, nor that the catastrophe would be detrimental because of the effects it would have on future not-yet-existing humans, as second-wave scholars hold, but rather it would be bad because of the immense amount of suffering it would cause to those humans who are currently alive (Beard and Torres 2020).

It is likely that these three phases often represent overlapping approaches to understanding and addressing existential risks, and each will continue to go grow and develop over time. The continued evolution of this line of thinking is demonstrated by the number of recently established research centers with high levels of funding, the growth of the Effective Altruism movement, and the number of scholars from different backgrounds who are being brought into these discussions.

Classifying Risks to Existence

Given the wide range of events or phenomena that could threaten human extinction, it is necessary to find ways of breaking down and categorizing these risks into smaller domains of analysis. Since its inception, refining the possible definitions of existential risks and ways in which they could be grouped has been a key concern of ERS. Perhaps the most instinctive way of grouping these kinds of risks is separating them into natural or anthropogenic sources of risk.

Humanity has contended with a host of natural existential risks since the dawn of time. These risks arise from natural vulnerability and occur independently of our existence on the planet (Bostrom 2019). Existential risks of this variety are events such as a comet or asteroid strike, a supervolcanic eruption, or a stellar explosion. These risks have always been there; yet we have only relatively recently become aware of them. Before we began to understand astrodynamics, it would have been difficult to imagine, let alone calculate, how likely it would be for an asteroid to strike the planet or assess the level of destruction such a strike might cause.

How dangerous are naturally occurring existential risks? Estimates on this vary. In his book The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity (2020), Toby Ord, places his current estimate on the total likelihood of all natural risks posing a threat to human extinction within the next 100 years at 1 in 10,000 (167).

Despite our seeming inability to affect natural events, these advancements in scientific understanding and technology have given us the potential to mitigate some of the death and destruction they may bring. Effective evacuation plans can be made for earthquakes. Robust systems of detection and early warning for tsunamis have been constructed. Organizations such as the International Asteroid Warning Network and the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs have even been constructed to track objects in space and calculate the likelihood of an impact on the earth (UNOOSA 2020; IAWN 2020; Ord 2020).

Anthropogenic risks are those that are directly related to our existence on this planet. These risks emerge as a result of our influence on the planet such as climate change, pollution, and loss of biodiversity and do not necessarily imply malicious intent. They can be a byproduct of the current ways in which humans live on earth, for example, habitat loss, globalization, and inadequate preparedness mechanisms for theoretically manageable problems such as the COVID-19 pandemic. These types of risks can also be a result of our technologies; most notably, the development of nuclear weapons leading to warfare shifting from a relatively low risk of existential catastrophe to the specter of annihilation now thought possible with any potential act of aggression involving a nuclear-armed state.

How likely is an anthropogenic risk? Ord (2020) estimates a 1 in 6 chance of an anthropogenically generated existential catastrophe in the next 100 years. What then is the total risk posed by both these types of risks, natural and manmade? Toby Ord (2020) estimated of total existential risk in the next century as 1 in 6 or as he wrote: “Russian roulette” (2020, 62). This estimate fits into Nick Bostrom’s statement that a typical range based on subjective surveys among experts is between a 10% and 20% chance of existential catastrophe in the same time period (Sandberg and Bostrom 2008, Bostrom 2013). Through writing on civilizational collapse and not existential risk, Sir Martin Rees, Royal Astronomer and co-founder of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, estimates that humanity has a 1 in 2 chance of surviving the century (Rees 2003). If these estimates are to be taken at face value, they are striking. Torres (2016) contextualizes the scale of these risks by pointing out that the average US American is 1500 times more likely to die in an extinction event rather than an airplane crash and 4000 times more likely to witness the collapse of civilization (as of 2016). However, it is important to note that there does not seem to be widespread consensus among a wide range of experts on the exact scale of this risk. However, as we will see, squabbling on the precise estimate may not be of much importance given the possible consequences of any of these events coming to pass.

As the field of ERS has grown, the theoretical frameworks and underlying ethics have changed and expanded as have the methodologies for classifying the risks. The classification methods are roughly traced along with the first-, second-, and third-wave paradigms. First-wave approaches to classification are heavily focused on the overall outcome of the risk. This is because, from this perspective, what is most important is the near-infinite number of potential future humans or posthumans that could span the galaxy. Risks are only problematic if they inhibit or significantly delay this trajectory. Bostrom (2002) proposed a system for classification along this line of thought, borrowing two of his categories from T.S. Elliot’s “The Hollow Men” (Beard and Torres 2020). Existential risks can be considered “bangs,” events such as an asteroid impact, super volcano eruption, badly designed superintelligent artificial intelligence, or a global nuclear war. In a “bang,” intelligent life goes suddenly extinct from acts of destruction, either intentional or unintentional. Risks can be “crunches,” events such as resource depletion, where the level of resources can no longer sustain advanced technological human civilization or humanity may succumb to dysgenic pressures, where it becomes vastly more fertile but much less intelligent. During a crunch, humanity may survive but our species is forever prevented from reaching the goal of posthuman galactic colonization. Humanity may end in a “shriek,” examples of this would be domination by badly designed artificial superintelligence or an uploaded human mind that grows to a superintelligence. In these examples, humanity achieves a degree of its posthuman future, but its effects are not wanted by the vast majority of people. Finally, the world may end in a “whimper,” which for Bostrom is either hitting some long-term limit on the expansion of humanity or the abandonment of what makes us human. Humanity could give up every activity: art, leisure, pleasure, family, and friends for the goal of interstellar colonization. In this example, humanity does not biologically die out but has changed to something else. In a whimper, humanity reaches a posthuman future but follows a trajectory where we live lives that humans do not find value in (Bostrom 2002).

Another outcome-oriented classification system later developed by Bostrom proposes a typology of existential risks based on the relationship between the probability of an event and its consequences. Any risk level of scope will be based on how many people are likely to be affected ranging from a single individual to multiple generations across the globe. This risk will also have a likely level of intensity, from being imperceptible to terminal. At the intersection of these two variables—a terminal level of intensity at the transgenerational scope—is human extinction. A step down from this intersection, in either scope (i.e., not transgenerational) or intensity (i.e., less than terminal intensity), would result in a global catastrophic risk. These are events that could be horrendous and could potentially require centuries or more from which to recover but would not result in the final extinction of humanity. Global catastrophic risks have also been defined as “possible events or processes that, were they to occur, would end the lives of approximately 10% or more of the global population or do comparable damage” (Cotton-Barratt et al. 2016). Bostrom’s spatial-temporal matrix was an important starting framework in the field of ERS as it implies that at different levels of intensity and scope, different types of strategies to mitigate these risks would need to be developed.

The Necessity, Tractability, and Importance (NTI) Framework, originally developed by the Open Philanthropy Project, is an example of a system of classification that is more in line with the second-wave approaches to ERS. This framework is oriented around the prioritization of focus and is heavily used in the Effective Altruism (EA) movement. If the ethos of EA is to do as much good as possible, then a system is needed to determine which efforts are likely to produce the “most good.” In order to do so, the NTI Framework utilizes three factors: how neglected the particular issue is, how tractable is (the likelihood that the issue can be affected), and how important the issue is (Open Philanthropy n.d.). This classification system, though having eschewed the emphasis on a transhuman future, still maintains the importance of longtermism, originally coined by Nick Beckstead 2013, and the qualifier strong longtermism later added that when decisions need to be made and actions taken, they should be done so that they benefit the long-term future and prioritize giving more benefits to the long-term future over the near term (Greaves and MacAskill 2021).

Third-wave approaches for understanding existential risks are those that build on a framework of systems thinking and complexity theory to examine the interplay between many causal factors that may result in an existential risk, while also considering how the levels of resilience, vulnerability, and exposure are understood. Exemplifying this type of approach, Karin Kuhlemann (2019) proposes distinguishing between sexy and unsexy risks. The so-called sexy existential risks grab our attention, imagination, and fascination. By definition, they have a low probability of occurring, but if they do, their disastrous outcome for the human species has the highest possible severity and magnitude. A meteor strike, a highly contagious and deadly pathogen, a nuclear war, and the rise of a hostile superintelligence are all examples of sexy risks. They can also be thought of as epistemically neat in that it is quite clear which academic field they fall under which makes coordinating inter-disciplinary approaches straightforward. To understand the threat and possibility of a meteor strike, we would naturally turn to astrophysicists and emergency managers. For a deadly pandemic we turn to epidemiologists and biologists. For the prospect of nuclear winter, meteorologists and physicists. For possible risks associated with artificial intelligence, we would rely on computer scientists and philosophers. These risks are viewed as having a sudden onset, a knockout punch, where the risk is crystallized in a matter of hours or years. Further, these risks tend to have a significant focus on technology as either the cause and/or solution to mitigating these risks (Kuhlemann 2019). Many of the sexy risks can be attributed to acts of nature (asteroid impact), malicious actors (nuclear weapons and engineered pandemics), or incompetence/lack of foresight and planning (runaway climate change and reckless AI development) (Kuhlemann 2019).

Unsexy risks have a low probability of an existential outcome but have a high probability of a less than existential outcome. These risks are epistemically messy and pose conceptually difficult wicked problems (Head and Alford 2015). Examples of these kinds of risks are the degradation and erosion of topsoil, waning biodiversity, increasing scarcity of freshwater, large-scale problems with unemployment, unsustainable fiscal policies, and overpopulation. These kinds of risks develop gradually and incrementally damage the potential for human flourishing. Unsexy risks arise from people behaving rationally, doing things they normally do, causing an aggregate impact over time that directly contributes to global catastrophic risks or indirectly to existential risks. These risks are messy, creeping, and highly political (Kuhlemann 2019).

Kuhlemann argues that between these two, the unsexy risks warrant more concerted attention than the sexy ones. The choice between the two is based on how one evaluates potential impacts for people currently existing or people in the future. People in the future are, of course, theoretical until they come to exist. It is true that there could be an astronomical number of people in the future on a long enough timeline. If focusing on a sexy or unsexy risk is based purely on the number of people who could benefit from it without regard to when those people exist, then the choice would focus on the sexy risks. Conversely, if equally weighted value is given to the actual living, breathing people, then the choice would be the unsexy risk. Of course, such a choice is hardly ever going to be exclusive, and there would likely be ways to work on unsexy risks that benefit living people that also have positive effects on future people (Kuhlemann 2019).

Following a similar third-wave approach, Avin et al. (2018) propose a system of classification that seeks to point out areas of convergence between possible risks. The first of these areas of convergences looks at how critical systems essential to human survival may be affected by a risk. Critical systems are considered to be those that sustain life on earth and range from physical systems (laws of nature, stability of temperature), through the whole organism (our ability to learn and reproduce), to the socio-technological (our ability to extract resources and influence the world around us). These systems are assessed in terms of boundaries and thresholds to consider what the breaking point may be for each system. The second organizational criteria are the mechanism that would spread that risk to the critical system(s) across the globe. These scale from mechanisms that spread through the biological, cultural, or digital worlds to those dispersal mechanisms that affect the air and water on the planet. Finally, the systems and institutions that could be used to prevent or mitigate these disasters are considered with regard to the possibility that they may fail under pressure. These are considered at the individual, interpersonal, institutional levels, and beyond.

A more immediately useful picture may arise when categorized in this overlapping manner. Because many risks have dissimilar initial causes, this way of thinking can pose different ways of understanding and mitigating risks that may not have been obvious when using different approaches. As Kuhlemann (2019) pointed out, existential risks, especially of the unsexy variety, tend not to be epistemically neat. By looking at risks in this, it may be easier to determine which expertise may be needed for a specific risk and where different kinds of expertise intersect. Finally, this structure, or another built on it, may prove useful for revealing previously unknown areas of neglect and, hopefully, contribute to providing a more resilient Existential Risk Mitigation system in the face of black swan events (Avin et al. 2018), those events that are highly influential and impossible to predict (Taleb 2010). The capacity to absorb the shocks of unpredictable events is critical to the survival of humanity, as target preventative measures cannot be taken.

In their article, “Governing Boring Apocalypses: A New Typology of Existential Vulnerabilities and Exposures for Existential Risk Research” (2018), Liu, Lauta, and Maas argue that focusing on vulnerabilities and exposures over specific existential hazards is a more helpful framework for increasing existential security. This systems perspective is warranted because few existential threats happen in a vacuum, and it is equally, if not more likely, that complex, slow-moving “unsexy” risk will threaten our extinction. Vulnerabilities here are “a weakness in a system that increases the chance that human civilization will collapse in response to pressure or challenge.” In their approach, an existential risk results from the interplay between a “hazard,” a “vulnerability,” and our “exposure.” From this way of thinking, when a specific “source of peril” (hazard) meets a vulnerable system and can affect a sufficient number of people, you get an existential risk. Put differently, “[…] a hazard is what kills us, and a vulnerability is how we die. Exposure is the interface or medium between what kills us, and how we die” (7).

They propose four classifications of vulnerabilities relevant to ERS. These are (1) Ontological, those vulnerabilities inherent in existing in a given time and space—human dependence on food and water paired with the ecosystem’s need for energy input; (2) Passive, those vulnerabilities that occur because of inaction—lack of a reliable global crisis management organization; (3) Active, those vulnerabilities that occur because of insufficient or misguided actions—insufficient protection of critical infrastructure to solar flares; and (4) Intentional, those vulnerabilities that are intentionally maintained—a centralized nuclear launch authority making it possible for a single actor to launch a nuclear attack (Liu et al. 2018).

Bostrom offers another understanding of vulnerabilities centered on technological development, which he terms “civilizational vulnerability.” This type of vulnerability rests on the premise that there is a level of technological development where the devastation of human civilization is almost ensured. This level of development, dubbed the “semi-anarchic default condition,” occurs when technological progress meets a limited capacity for control (Bostrom 2019). In this civilizational condition, there are four types of vulnerabilities:

  • (Type-1) where it becomes very easy for any small number of people to cause mass destruction; for example, advances in biotechnology lower the bar to the creation of virulent and deadly engineered pathogens, so that anyone with a basic understanding of biochemistry and lab procedures could do it;

  • (Type 2-a) a technology emerges that encourages powerful actors to cause mass destruction; for example, a way of reliably shielding one country from a nuclear attack could undermine the doctrine of nuclear security, leading to a situation where first strikes become more likely;

  • (Type 2-b) a technology emerges that causes actors to cause (seemingly) minor damage to the world, where the sum of those destructive acts is civilizational devastation, imagine global warming, but on a much more accelerated timeframe;

  • (Type 2-c) technology is developed, in which the first use causes a catastrophe; for example, when the first thermonuclear bomb was detonated, there was not 100% confidence that it would not set off a chain reaction and set the atmosphere ablaze (Bostrom 2019).

Generally, the term resiliency was often used in the hard sciences to refer to “the persistence of relationship within a system” and measure the system’s ability to absorb variables while maintaining a similar enough identity. The stability of a system then would refer to the “ability of a system to return to equilibrium after a temporary disturbance” (Holling 1973, 17). The term has expanded in its usage, adapting resiliency and stability to describe the systems of interactions between humanity and nature (Maher and Baum 2013). Another helpful definition of resilience is “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while changing to still retain the same function, structure and feedbacks and therefore identity” (Folke et al. 2010).

In ERS, the concept of resiliency goes hand in hand with “vulnerability.” As a species, we may be moving into the unknown. Despite the myriad of threats that could come knocking on our door, it is worth remembering that humanity is a resilient species. Approximately 70,000 years ago, the Lake Toba super volcano erupted, the largest eruption in the history of civilization. As a result, human populations are believed to have been diminished to between three and ten thousand (Currie and Éigeartaigh 2018). From a deep-time perspective, humans have been on earth for less than the blink of an eye, but have overcome innumerable challenges within that blink. The resilience of humanity as a collective has been a major determining factor in why Homo Sapiens are the only hominids around.

As the concept is applied in ERS, resiliency refers to the ability of human civilization to survive in extreme scenarios. If the overall vulnerability is below a certain threshold, then adaptation is still possible. Resiliency is our overall ability to adapt to the risks encountered. If a catastrophe were to occur on a global scale that exceeds overall resilience, then recovery from the disaster would not be possible. Resiliency and sustainability are interconnected in this way of thinking (Baum and Handoh 2014). It may be tempting to fall into understandings of sustainability that invoke notions of stasis. However, when considering the presence of existential risks alongside possible future trajectories of human civilization, status quo is the least likely. Understanding sustainability in dynamic terms and overall trajectory is more helpful (2013).

Challenges of Working on Existential Risks

To understand and mitigate existential risks is to face a particular set of challenges. The first involves assessing the probability of a particular risk or a set of risks and then determining what degree of probability would be sufficiently low enough not to warrant attention. Conversely, identifying where the threshold is on the upper bounds is equally challenging: when does action need to be taken? Existential risks are, almost by definition, unprecedented. If one had come to full fruition, we would not be here thinking about them. No one would be here thinking or writing about them. They are challenging to envision or assess when they are not part of our experience.

It is clear that reducing the chance that humans will become extinct is fundamental for most people, but how should the value of reducing vulnerabilities to existential risks be considered? Who will bear the cost, and who will reap the reward? Given the possible timescale creeping risks require current generations to invest heavily for a sense of existential security they will not live to experience. Given that the scope of existential risks almost always threatens on a global scale, international cooperation and trust will be essential to address the vast majority of these risks. Tensions are likely to arise along issues of state sovereignty and the tenability of investment in risk reduction to election cycles. Further, humans can be highly rational creatures, are not solely rational ones, and it can be hard to predict how collective fears and anxieties may alter approaches to understanding and mitigating risks.

The general approach to dealing with problems as a species has tended to be either through trial and error or through building predictive theories. Neither of these approaches can be relied upon for assessing existential risks. With this level of severity and scope, there would likely be no second chances. Humanity has learned to overcome many threats to our existence through its technology and the social, political, and cultural systems and institutions they have developed. However, these institutions were developed for different classifications of threats and different ways of addressing them (Pinker 2019; Ord 2020).

Living is dangerous, and concern with figuring out the extent of that danger has been with humanity for a long time. The observation that catastrophes have happened and will happen in the future is a theme in many of our species’ oldest stories. A few critical scientific discoveries instigated this shift: that species can go, and have gone, extinct; that humanity is, in fact, a species and part of the natural world; and the advent of nuclear weapons for the first time provided a tangible example of just how our extinction could happen. It is against this backdrop that the ERS emerged. The field and its theoretical foundations have gone through many interactions in a short time. The story of the discipline can be thought of as three interrelated waves of development. Its first wave rests on ideas of Transhumanism and Utilitarianism, its second on Effective Altruism, and a newly emerging third wave has an emphasis on understanding resilience, vulnerabilities, and exposures. Since its inception, ERS has emphasized defining and clarifying typologies of potential risks to humanity’s long-term survival. As the understanding of existential and global catastrophic risks has grown, so too have perspectives on how they interact with and potentially threaten human civilization.