Complexity-Informed Governance for Contemporary International Security

International security challenges in today's world spring from myriad sources in what might be considered a multilevel vertical and horizontal interactive global system, in which each governance level is autonomous yet interdependent with other levels. The risks and uncertainties arising through these interactions in different forms of security arrangements—global, national, and human—need to be seen for what they are: complex adaptive systems (CAS) with many layers of autonomous yet interdependent actors and variables. Traditional linear, deterministic, and reductionist approaches cannot adequately deal with the resulting emergent issues, as the assumptions of linearity and determinism in which outputs are proportional to inputs, where cause and effect are observable, no longer hold. Complex systems thinking and anticipatory governance as the frameworks utilised provide an alternative epistemic perspective for the analysis of international security, and this research seeks to exemplify it through the case study of the Iraq Crisis. This original research paper explores the Iraq War Crisis through the viewpoint of complexity, and encourages the adoption of a holistic systems perspective in upcoming research on global affairs.