Twenty Years of Cliodynamics
October 23, 2021
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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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History by Numbers
November 17, 2020
The story behind Figuring Out the Past by Peter Turchin and Daniel Hoyer Four years ago we got an interesting proposal from Ed Lake, the book acquisition editor at Profile Books. Profile has been publishing The Economist’s Pocket World in Figures series, an annually reissued statistic
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“The Mad Prophet of Connecticut”
November 12, 2020
Graeme Wood penned a “long read” about cliodynamics, me, and the Age of Discord in which we are currently find ourselves. Graeme is a very intelligent journalist and his explanations of cliodynamics and structural-demographic mechanisms that bring about state breakdown are
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America in November 2020: a Structural-Demographic View from Alpha Centauri
November 01, 2020
As readers of this blog know, structural-demographic theorists distinguish between two causes of revolutions and civil wars: structural trends, which build slowly and are quite predictable, and much less predictable, or even unpredictable, triggering events. In this view, a revolution
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