War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires

by Peter Turchin

general theory for the rise and decline of empires we have. The crucial variable in it is the collective capacity for action, the society’s asabiya. Competition between societies leads to asabiya increase, whereas competition within a society causes its asabiya to decline. As we have seen in Part I of this book, metaethnic frontiers, where groups and civilizations clash, are the crucibles within which high-asabiya societies are forged. The almost inevitable consequence of high capacity for collective action, however, is territorial expansion that pushes the frontiers away from the center and removes the very forces that fostered high asabiya in the first place. Thus, success breeds eventual failure; the rise carries within it the seeds of the fall—peace brings war, and war brings peace. In the language of nonlinear dynamics, rise-and-fall phenomena are explained by negative feedback loops.