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Category: Project

Description: Complex urban societies have dominated recent human histories, to the point that many ignore that human are able to coordinate outside debt relations, taxation to the profit of administrative elites, control of a hierarchical administration by elites, and monopoly of legitimate violence by the State. The role of this project is to relate the study of early emergence of States, and a predictive account of their role in the Anthropocene. States are to be understood in this framework as a core element of a stable evolutionary complex that has perisisted in its functions and dynamics since the Neolithic revolution. Given the role of an extractive economy in this complex, one can highly expect that resource contraction will cause in the near future a crisis of the ability of most States to maintain coordination except from coercion, which is the typical mechanism mediating historical collapse event. Because of this result, I urge all persons and institutions to support to the full extent of their ability the current acceleration of social and ecological justice, cooperative economy, and local participative democracy.