Systemic Risk: The Threat to Societal Diversity and Coherence

Insights from complexity science can be applied to the analysis of social processes in heterogeneous societies. Many features that characterize and influence complex structures in nearly every domain of nature, technology, and society can be derived from simple modeling processes in physics and chemistry. If one applies these features to the structure of social risks, a number of insights are gained that can be subject to further empirical analysis. In particular, they add—to the well‐known steering mechanisms of hierarchy, competition, and cooperation—the contribution of self‐organization, the effect of which is underestimated in almost all theories of social science. But in view of the crises facing modern democracy, such as migration and populism, it is precisely this mechanism of dynamic structure generation that is decisive for an effective and fair risk governance. In this article, we analyze the threat to societal diversity and coherence on the basis of complexity science.