What leads to political turbulence and social breakdown? Is there any way to stop history repeating itself today? Peter Turchin has mined 10,000 years of data to find the answer.

Peter Turchin has pioneered a new science of making history predictable – by applying methods that had already succeeded in other complex fields. You’ll want to know what he sees lying ahead, and what we can do about it — Jared Diamond

For decades, complexity scientist Peter Turchin has been studying world history like no-one else, analysing data and building new models from ten millennia of human activity.

Now he joins us to present his results: nothing less than a klaxon call to prevent a violent political rupture that threatens to upend life and society as we know it.

In this live event, he will present a ground-breaking account of how human societies work, explaining how, when the shifting balance of power between the ruling class and the majority tips too far in favour of elites, elite overproduction leads to state breakdown. It happened in imperial China, in medieval France, in the American Civil War – and it is happening now.

Can we restore the balance between the elites and the majority and escape the patterns of the past? Or is catastrophic breakdown now inevitable? Find out in this unmissable live talk.