As a follow-up of an academic workshop held in April 2019 at the Global Studies Institute of the University of Geneva on “The EU and the Crisis of the International Liberal Order: A Systemic Crisis?”, the main objective of this collaborative and interdisciplinary research project is enhance our understanding of global and regional systemic crises including their drivers, consequences and dynamics. An important step towards the interdisciplinary study of the factors of resilience and sustainability of modern societies is the establishment of a common vocabulary (e.g. feedback, cascade, contagion, triggers, tipping points, stability, fragility, collapse, hysteresis etc.) that can used across sciences.
Accordingly, the first objective of the project is to build a framework which aims to synthesise the concepts originating from systems and complexity science to understand and analyse systemic crises. Relevant elements include the 1) various types of factors, i.e. systemic risks, that may lead to a crisis, 2) the mechanisms that unfold when a crisis occurs, and 3) the idea of preventing and/or reacting to crisis through resilience and transformation. The second objective of the project is to use the interdisciplinary framework to conduct case studies about different global and regional contemporary crises originating from diverse sectors (e.g. health, environment, economy etc). The focus is on the role of global and regional governance including the design of institutions and the role of technologies to prevent, prepare, and react to systemic crises.