Modelling Scales of Societal Resilience to Concurrent Shocks in the Asia-Pacific Region
Principal Investigator: Michael Frachetti, Washington University in St. Louis
Co- Principal Investigators: Patrick Daly, Washington University in St. Louis and Ezra Zubrow, SUNY Buffalo
Years of Award: 2024-2027
Managing Service Agency: Air Force Office of Scientific Research
Project Description:
In recent years, the world has witnessed a surge in environmental and social disruptions, amplifying concerns about the vulnerability of ecological, economic, and socio-political systems to various shocks. Projections indicate a trajectory of increasingly severe and complex systemic shocks in the 21st century, with implications spanning from the degradation of arable land and potable water to financial instability, mass population displacement, and conflict. Understanding societal resilience in the face of these challenges is crucial for both humanitarian and security reasons, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region (APAC), characterized by its diverse cultural, economic, and political contexts.
Our interdisciplinary project will develop and test novel frameworks for understanding societal strategies to adapt to systemic shocks across APAC. This comparative project will develop a nuanced understanding of the main drivers of conservative, transformative, and equitable societal resilience. Central to this project are three questions: 1) What are the key variables that influence societal resilience in the face of different types, durations, and combination of shocks across diverse ecological and societal contexts? 2) What is the frequency of stand-alone, sequential, or concurrent shocks in APAC and how does the periodicity of experienced shocks shape societal resilience? 3) What are the implications of analysing societal resilience at different spatio-temporal scales and units of analysis?
Our experienced team of Anthropologists, Archaeologists, Climatologists, Economists, and Social Work experts will pursue five objectives: constructing conceptual models of societal resilience, assessing systemic shock frequencies, studying societal responses, identifying micro-scale drivers of vulnerability and resilience, and co-producing applied frameworks for enhancing resilience and regional security. Our project includes a number of innovative approaches that will lead to new advancements in the scientific study of societal resilience. We integrate non-western knowledge and indigenous perspectives to generate inclusive and transferable theories of resilience. We conduct in-depth analysis of high-resolution case-studies to better understand how resilience plays out a very local scales across diverse contexts. We produce the first detailed historical analysis of paleoclimatic, geospatial, and historical data about concurrent shocks and their social responses for APAC. Our intellectual alignment of detailed, modern-day data with historical, environmental, and anthropological datasets will generate a multi-scalar framework to better understand the diverse expressions of resilience through time and across a range of ecological and social settings.