Big Gods and Big Societies: A Closure
May 28, 2022
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Eleven years ago we launched the Seshat project with the goal of collecting data that would enable us to test the many theories aiming to explain the evolution of large-scale complex human societies over the past 10,000 years. We now have a bunch of papers, some already published, oth
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War and Peace and War: Two Decades Later
April 13, 2022
Recently there has been a lot of interest in translating my books into non-English languages, a development that I heartily welcome (I touched upon it in my previous post and in this one). Earlier this month, Warsaw Enterprise Institute published a Polish translation of War and Peace
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What I am working on
March 14, 2022
Readers of this blog have, no doubt, noticed that over the past year, or more, my posts here have been few and far in between. I have also been turning down 99% of requests for interviews and public lectures. The reason is that I have taken on too many projects—more than I can deal wi
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Twenty Years of Cliodynamics
October 23, 2021
Almuzara is about to publish a Spanish translation of my book Historical Dynamics. When they asked for a foreword to the Spanish edition, I realized that it has already been 20 years since I wrote Historical Dynamics. So this foreword serves as a kind of retrospective. Here’s th
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State Collapse and Nation Building in Afghanistan
August 15, 2021
Today the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan collapsed. Top officials, from president Ashraf Ghani down, have run away. The army partly melted away, partly defected to Taliban. There are reports of looting in Kabul, as cops have deserted their posts. This is a classical state collapse, a
Continue Reading →A Hit-Piece on Cliodynamics
June 21, 2021
There is a remarkably biased and deceptive piece in Foreign Policy with a critique of Cliodynamics, among other things. The Past Doesn’t Tell Easy Stories About the West The author writes, “Peter Turchin and his collaborators have championed a new approach in which history as a disc
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A Retrospective on War and Peace and War
May 30, 2021
Penguin Random House, which published my book War and Peace and War (henceforward, WPW) in 2005 decided that now is a good time to promote it. For a short time, the e-book version, sold on all different platforms, is priced at $1.99. If you haven’t read it, get it now while the promot
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The dark side of “eating lower on the food chain”
March 06, 2021
Nine years ago I made one of the most consequential decisions of my life—I switched to the so-called Paleo Diet (“paleo” is a bit misleading, as I explain in the post). Had I not done so, I would certainly have contributed to the rising obesity statistics for the United States. Within
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The Storming of the U.S. Capitol
January 07, 2021
On one level, that of macrosocial dynamics, what happened yesterday, January 6, 2021, is not surprising. After all, my own model indicates that structural pressures for instability in the United States continue to build up. On a more immediate micro-level, watching hundreds of demonst
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