TY  - JOUR
PY  - 2014//
TI  - Dealing with femtorisks in international relations
JO  - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
A1  - Frank, Aaron Benjamin
A1  - Collins, Margaret Goud
A1  - Levin, Simon A.
A1  - Lo, Andrew W.
A1  - Ramo, Joshua
A1  - Dieckmann, Ulf
A1  - Kremenyuk, Victor
A1  - Kryazhimskiy, Arkady
A1  - Linnerooth-Bayer, JoAnne
A1  - Ramalingam, Ben
A1  - Roy, J. Stapleton
A1  - Saari, Donald G.
A1  - Thurner, Stefan
A1  - von Winterfeldt, Detlof
SP  - 17356
EP  - 17362
VL  - 111
IS  - 49
N2  - The contemporary global community is increasingly interdependent and confronted with systemic risks posed by the actions and interactions of actors existing beneath the level of formal institutions, often operating outside effective governance structures. Frequently, these actors are human agents, such as rogue traders or aggressive financial innovators, terrorists, groups of dissidents, or unauthorized sources of sensitive or secret information about government or private sector activities. In other instances, influential "actors" take the form of climate change, communications technologies, or socioeconomic globalization. Although these individual forces may be small relative to state governments or international institutions, or may operate on long time scales, the changes they catalyze can pose significant challenges to the analysis and practice of international relations through the operation of complex feedbacks and interactions of individual agents and interconnected systems. We call these challenges "femtorisks," and emphasize their importance for two reasons. First, in isolation, they may be inconsequential and semiautonomous; but when embedded in complex adaptive systems, characterized by individual agents able to change, learn from experience, and pursue their own agendas, the strategic interaction between actors can propel systems down paths of increasing, even global, instability. Second, because their influence stems from complex interactions at interfaces of multiple systems (e.g., social, financial, political, technological, ecological, etc.), femtorisks challenge standard approaches to risk assessment, as higher-order consequences cascade across the boundaries of socially constructed complex systems. We argue that new approaches to assessing and managing systemic risk in international relations are required, inspired by principles of evolutionary theory and development of resilient ecological systems.<p />  <p>Language: en</p>
LA  - en
SN  - 0027-8424
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1400229111
ID  - ref1
ER  -