State Crisis Theory: A systematization of institutional, socio-ecological, demographic-structural, world-systems, and revolutions research

Today's ecological and political instability has renewed interest in how similar problems have arisen in the past – and how they have been resolved. But current research remains divided along different research traditions. Here, I draw together five broad research strands: neo-institutionalism, socio-ecological systems, demographic-structural theories, world-systems approaches, and peace and conflict research. I begin by establishing that each of these five traditions proposes to explain state crisis, in the sense of a decisive turning point from which the state might not emerge in its current form. But each of the five strands proposes a slightly different set of hypotheses, and adduces a slightly different set of cases in support. To unify these into a single theory, I set out a typology of the various ecological and institutional drivers of state crisis, and identify four broad social responses: reform; entrenchment of elites; breakdown of the state; and collapse. Thanks to this typology, I draw attention to a neglected distinction between crises that take place in different ecological-economic conditions, with crises that occur in conditions of worsening scarcity hypothesised to have very different causes and trajectories to crises that occur in conditions of sufficiency. But beyond this fundamental scarcity/sufficiency distinction, I find no other outright contradictions between different hypotheses. Compiling these into a unified state crisis theory establishes a framework for testing these competing, but entirely compatible, hypotheses.