I looked into this a bit during 2014-2017. At the time I thought it was plausible that mechanisms similar to state failure (including even significant underdevelopment such that effective policing never becomes possible) might be the source of a noteworthy amount of existential risk. I mentioned this in passing in Ruling Ourselves.
Bostrom’s “Vulnerable World Hypothesis” also contains some ideas that point in this direction.
Since then I’ve updated pretty strongly in the direction of focusing on advanced nations and great powers. As far as I can tell, it will be these nations that shape the development and use of every transformative technology that has shown up on my radar. Thus, I now focus heavily on great powers.
State collapse is probably fairly heavily studied in the realm of nuclear security (think post-Soviet countries, Pakistan, and North Korea for starters), which for traditional IR is about as close as one gets to existential risk.
I looked into this a bit during 2014-2017. At the time I thought it was plausible that mechanisms similar to state failure (including even significant underdevelopment such that effective policing never becomes possible) might be the source of a noteworthy amount of existential risk. I mentioned this in passing in Ruling Ourselves.
Bostrom’s “Vulnerable World Hypothesis” also contains some ideas that point in this direction.
Since then I’ve updated pretty strongly in the direction of focusing on advanced nations and great powers. As far as I can tell, it will be these nations that shape the development and use of every transformative technology that has shown up on my radar. Thus, I now focus heavily on great powers.
State collapse is probably fairly heavily studied in the realm of nuclear security (think post-Soviet countries, Pakistan, and North Korea for starters), which for traditional IR is about as close as one gets to existential risk.