Renowned social scientist Peter Turchin will stay with us for three weeks
Born and raised in Russia, Peter Turchin started his career as a theoretical biologist but moved on to historical social sciences. He is interested in understanding “how human societies evolve, and why we see such a staggering degree of inequality in economic performance and effectiveness of governance among nations”.Peter uses Cliodynamics as a tool for understanding – an area of research he substantially helped to develop during the past years. Cliodynamics treat history as a predictive, analytic science. It works transdisciplinary, integrating historical macrosociology, cultural and social evolution, economic history (cliometrics), the construction and analysis of historical databases, and mathematical modeling of long-term social processes.“Large databases allow us to test rival social scientific hypotheses with historical and archaeological data for a multitude of global snapshots”, says Peter, who chairs such a database: Seshat–The Global History DatabankOn October 2 and 3, 2017, Peter Turchin will chair the CSH workshop on the Evolution of Social Complexity.
