title: Dealing with femtorisks in international relations.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computational Social Science, George Mason University, Arlington, VA 22030; afrank3@gmu.edu slevin@princeton.edu.
authors.forename: Aaron Benjamin
authors.initials: AB
authors.lastname: Frank
authors.affiliation: International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria;
authors.forename: Margaret Goud
authors.initials: MG
authors.lastname: Collins
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544; afrank3@gmu.edu slevin@princeton.edu.
authors.forename: Simon A
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Levin
authors.affiliation: Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02142;
authors.forename: Andrew W
authors.initials: AW
authors.lastname: Lo
authors.affiliation: Kissinger Associates, New York, NY 10022;
authors.forename: Joshua
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Ramo
authors.affiliation: International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria;
authors.forename: Ulf
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Dieckmann
authors.affiliation: Institute for US and Canadian Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow 123995, Russia;
authors.forename: Victor
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Kremenyuk
authors.affiliation: International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria; Steklov Institute of Mathematics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow 119991, Russia;
authors.forename: Arkady
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Kryazhimskiy
authors.affiliation: International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria;
authors.forename: JoAnne
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Linnerooth-Bayer
authors.affiliation: Overseas Development Institute, London, United Kingdom;
authors.forename: Ben
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Ramalingam
authors.affiliation: Kissinger Institute on China and the United States, The Wilson Center, Washington, DC 20004;
authors.forename: J Stapleton
authors.initials: JS
authors.lastname: Roy
authors.affiliation: Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697;
authors.forename: Donald G
authors.initials: DG
authors.lastname: Saari
authors.affiliation: International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria; Medical University of Vienna, A-1090 Vienna, Austria; and.
authors.forename: Stefan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Thurner
authors.affiliation: Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089.
authors.forename: Detlof
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: von Winterfeldt
keywords: complex adaptive systems; contagion; resilience; risk analysis; systemic risk