Thomas Homer-Dixon

"A Theory of Societal Collapse: Convergent Shocks, Thermodynamic Disequilibrium, and Brittleness"

Tuesday, Oct. 2, 2007
Noon
Mershon Center for International Security Studies
1501 Neil Ave., Columbus, OH 43201

See a streaming video of this event. This streaming video requires RealPlayer. If you do not have RealPlayer, you can download it free.

Thomas Homer-Dixon is Director of the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies and Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto.

His books include The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization (Knopf, Island Press, 2006); The Ingenuity Gap (Knopf, Jonathan Cape, 2000), which won the 2001 Governor General’s Non-fiction Award; Environment, Scarcity, and Violence (Princeton, 1999), which received the 2000 Lynton Keith Caldwell Prize from the American Political Science Association; and, co-edited with Jessica Blitt, Ecoviolence: Links among Environment, Population, and Security (Rowman & Littlefield, 1998).

Homer-Dixon’s most recent research has focused on threats to global security in the 21st century and on how societies adapt to complex economic, ecological, and technological change. His work is highly interdisciplinary, drawing on political science, economics, environmental studies, geography, cognitive science, social psychology, and complex systems theory.

He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on environmental security; causes of war, revolution, and ethnic conflict; international relations; and complexity theory. In 1999 he received the University of Toronto’s Northrop Frye Teaching Award for integrating teaching and research.

Homer-Dixon received a bachelor’s in political science from Carleton University in Ottawa in 1980, and a Ph.D. in political science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989.

Thomas Homer-Dixon
Director of the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies
University of Toronto