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This book draws together chapters by leading global experts to explore the complex relationship between food security and sociopolitical stability up to roughly 2025. It offers new insights building on lessons learned since the 2008 and 2011 global food price spikes sparked political unrest that toppled multiple governments and spurred a global land rush unlike any seen since the nineteenth century. The volume opens with three broad background papers that discuss the full sweep of the topic and likely scenarios over the coming decade for the global food economy and climate patterns relevant to food production. These chapters are followed by a group of thematic papers, cutting across major world regions to look at core stressors or responses: the policies, technologies, and key resource inputs of the global food system. The last set of chapters explore the political economy of food security strategies in key developing countries and regions. These chapters explore how emerging market firms and governments might attempt to satisfy growth in domestic food demand in the face of various global stressors, through a range of labor, land, technology, trade, water, and related actions or policies, as well as which sociopolitical instability risks might be associated with those strategies.

Many historical processes are dynamic. Populations grow and decline. Empires expand and collapse. Religions spread and wither. Natural scientists have made great strides in understanding dynamical processes in the physical and biological worlds using a synthetic approach that combines mathematical modeling with statistical analyses. Taking up the problem of territorial dynamics—why some polities at certain times expand and at other times contract—this book shows that a similar research program can advance our understanding of dynamical processes in history. The book develops hypotheses from a wide range of social, political, economic, and demographic factors: geopolitics, factors affecting collective solidarity, dynamics of ethnic assimilation/religious conversion, and the interaction between population dynamics and sociopolitical stability. It then translates these into a spectrum of mathematical models, investigates the dynamics predicted by the models, and contrasts model predictions with empirical patterns. The book's highly instructive empirical tests demonstrate that certain models predict empirical patterns with a very high degree of accuracy. For instance, one model accounts for the recurrent waves of state breakdown in medieval and early modern Europe. And historical data confirm that ethno-nationalist solidarity produces an aggressively expansive state under certain conditions (such as in locations where imperial frontiers coincide with religious divides). The strength of the book's results suggests that the synthetic approach advocated can significantly improve our understanding of historical dynamics.