Differentiation and Political De-Differentiation in the Periphery of the Modern Society

This work wants to analyze, from the theoretical-conceptual architectural frame of the General Theory of Social Systems (TGSS), and problematize the relationships and the logical articulations between the system of politics, economics and law to observe what have been the hetero-descriptions of the democratic state in the periphery of modern society (1).The processes of functional differentiation characterizing the institutionalization of structures and expectations –normative, cognitive– in the evolutionary becoming of the State-nation, in Latin America, stabilized the logic of the patrimonial political centralism, so that the history of innumerable legal-political and economic reforms have been used rather to perpetuate the status quo than to change something (2). It's interesting to observe, for this reason, the developing of many forms of coordination and social development to achieve the desired modernity in the continent, from the presidential caudillism, Cepalian developmentalism (1950), military praetorianism (1970), till the forms of economical laissez faire (1990). These models have basically revolved around the valorization of the clientelistic political regime as a central space for the construction of democracy and the market (3). In this context, cognitive and normative expectations (law) have not managed to generate lasting political accommodations that facilitate sociopolitical evolution, where corporations, families and clientelistic caudillism continue to prevail, except the institutionalized expectations (4). The question then is not how ‘democracy should be’, but how is this possible in this periphery of modernity.

Scaling major transitions in human sociopolitical complexity

The human species is diverse in the size, structure and complexity of our social organizations. Today, human sociopolitical complexity ranges from stateless small-scale societies to complex states that integrate millions of individuals over vast geographic areas. Here, we explore major transitions across this range of complexity. In particular, we examine the statistical structure of these transitions using Horton-Strahler branching, generalized Horton Laws, and allometric spatial mixed-effect models. We show that all major transitions in sociopolitical complexity follow an invariant fractal-like growth process; with each transition there is an additional level of jurisdictional hierarchy, a four-fold increase in population size, a two-fold increase in population area, and therefore a doubling of population density. These statistics fully describe all transitions from the least to the most complex societies. However, these transitions are probabilistic, not deterministic in nature. This fact explains the asymmetry of human sociopolitical evolution: while more complex societies were necessarily once less complex, less complex societies do not necessarily become more complex.

From Scale to Information and Back: Human Social Evolution in the Holocene

We use the recently introduced Seshat database to investigate the long-timescale development of human societies. Seshat contains high-dimensional sociopolitical features for hundreds of polities, from multiple continents, over many thousands of years. Examining the statistical covariations among those social features, we find that the process of sociopolitical development is dominated first by growth in polity scale, then by improvements in its information processing and economic systems, and then by further increases in scale. This allows us to define a Scale Threshold for societies, beyond which growth in information processing becomes paramount, and an Information Threshold, which once crossed permits additional growth in scale. Polities diverge from one another in sociopolitical feature space prior to crossing the Information Threshold, but then reconverge. Our results have implications for the timing of the appearance of moralizing gods, the role of population growth and institutions in sociopolitical evolution, and the causes for the evolutionary divergence between Old and New World polities.

The Oxford Handbook of Nigerian Politics

The Oxford Handbook of Nigerian Politics offers a comprehensive analysis of Nigeria’s very rich history and ever-changing politics to its readers. It provides a deep understanding of Nigeria’s sociopolitical evolution and experience by covering a broad range of political issues and historical eras. The volume encompasses forty-four chapters organized thematically into essays covering history, political institutions, civil society, economic and social policy, identity and insecurity, and Nigeria in a globalized world. By identifying many of the classic debates in Nigerian politics, the chapters serve as an authoritative introduction to Africa’s most populous country. The chapters are interdisciplinary, introducing readers to classic debates and key research on Nigeria, as well as new methodologies, new data, and a compelling corpus of research questions for the next generation of researchers and readers interested in Africa.