When political systems descend into conflict, the standard explanations tend to revolve around human error: failed diplomacy, miscalculation, or the deliberate pursuit of aggressive ambition. These accounts can be persuasive, but they often obscure a deeper structural reality. Some conflicts occur not because leaders consciously choose war, but because the system itself has reached the outer limits of its ability to function in its existing form. Gunitsky (2013) made this point in his work on non-linear systemic change, emphasising that large-scale political disruption often emerges from shifts in the structure of the system rather than the direct intentions of individual actors. Açıkalın (2022) reinforces this view, showing how complexity and system saturation can push political orders toward transformation without any single actor driving the process.

In highly connected environments, the sheer number and speed of diplomatic signals, institutional linkages, and economic dependencies can grow faster than the system’s capacity to manage them. This is the condition described here as saturation: a state in which even routine exchanges add to the overall strain because there is no remaining capacity to absorb them. Political orders under saturation often turn to established feedback loops to maintain stability. These loops take the form of repeated diplomatic rituals, standardised language in communiqués, or predictable institutional procedures. Initially, such loops help maintain coherence by creating a stable rhythm of interaction. But, as Megan Morrison, J. Nathan Kutz, and Michael Gabbay have demonstrated in their modelling of peace-to-war transitions (2022), feedback can eventually become recursion: a closed pattern of repeated frames and responses that no longer resolves tensions and instead amplifies them.

When saturation and recursion combine, the system’s stabilising tools start to fail. Conflict in these conditions becomes less a matter of calculated choice and more a structural necessity. It acts as a reset, altering which actors are directly connected, severing certain links altogether, and reducing the complexity that had overloaded the system. This reset can take the form of a sudden, centralised collapse or unfold more gradually in multiple locations at once. In both cases, the outcome is a new pattern of relationships that the system can manage more easily, at least until saturation builds again.

This article develops its argument in four steps. First, it defines the core concepts of saturation, recursion, adjacency, and phase transition in plain but precise terms. Second, it examines how these dynamics have shaped historical and contemporary cases: the tightly coupled European system before 1914, the post-2003 Middle East, and the 2022 war in Ukraine. Third, it outlines a typology of centralised rupture and polycentric turbulence to explain the different ways in which systems reorganise under stress. Finally, it draws out the strategic implications of this framework for recognising, anticipating, and managing instability both before and after rupture.

Saturation and Recursion

Saturation occurs when the volume and speed of interactions in a political system exceed its ability to process them effectively. These interactions might be diplomatic exchanges, trade flows, security commitments, or complex institutional procedures. Brian Castellani and Frederic Hafferty (2009) describe saturation as a point where the density of linkages produces more stress than the system can redistribute. John Byrne and Gill Callaghan (2014), further note that systems under saturation often appear stable for long periods because they manage strain rather than resolve it. Beneath the surface, however, unresolved contradictions accumulate until even minor shocks can trigger instability.

Recursion refers to the process by which systems feed past outputs back into present behaviour. In the context of international politics, recursion manifests in repeated alliance consultations, predictable summit formats, or the rigid reuse of established diplomatic language. In stable conditions, such patterns create reassurance and predictability. Açıkalın’s study of complexity in global governance shows that these loops initially reinforce coherence by making interactions legible and repeatable. Yet, as Morrison, Kutz, and Gabbay demonstrated in their modelling of political networks, once a system is saturated, recursion can shift from being stabilising to being self-reinforcing in ways that worsen misalignment. Messages are recycled without introducing new meaning, and responses are locked into fixed patterns that leave little space for adaptation.

This combination of saturation and recursion generates a particular kind of fragility. Outwardly, the system may project stability through regular summits, treaty renewals, and formal cooperation. Inwardly, it becomes brittle. The feedback loops designed to keep it coherent end up amplifying existing tensions. At this point, as argued by Gunitsky, instability can arise without any actor seeking it, simply because the system has lost the ability to absorb and reinterpret signals.

Europe before the First World War illustrates this pattern with unusual clarity. The elaborate web of treaties, alliances, and mobilisation plans was intended to deter conflict by ensuring that any act of aggression would trigger predictable countermeasures. By 1914, however, this system had become rigid and overloaded. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo was not just a political shock; it was an event interpreted entirely through pre-set frameworks of mobilisation and alliance commitment. Cederman’s modelling of war onset (2003) shows how such highly coupled systems can cascade from stability to breakdown once the pressure reaches a certain point. Each diplomatic or military move activated a chain of expected responses from other states, leaving no space for interpretive flexibility. The result was not a chaotic collapse but the release of a system that could no longer bear its own structural weight.

Conflict as Phase Transition

In physics, a phase transition is the point at which a system changes state — ice melting into water, for example — once a critical........

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