Anticipating Instability: Assessing and Removing Risks Before They Happen

A theory of politics that looks at what did not happen—or non-events—to explain policy change, economic development, democratization, and “autocratization.”

Anticipating Instability puts forward a general theory of politics that attempts to explain the very many destabilizing political events in history that did not happen. Although most of us do not pay close attention to what did not occur, research shows that fear of non-events does more to redefine how people are governed than does the a...