Propagation of Damages in a Complex Resilience Model: Drivers of Social Conflict in Resilience and Security Contexts

In an increasingly interconnected world, the capacity of societies to withstand, adapt to, and recover from crises is a central challenge for security and sustainable development. Yet, despite extensive research on resilience, the mechanisms through which systemic vulnerabilities emerge and propagate across social domains remain poorly understood. This paper addresses this gap by proposing a network-based framework: the Complex Analysis for Socio-Environmental Adaptation (CASA), which models resilience as a graph-structured system. Each node in CASA represents a social or infrastructural component whose resistance is derived from indicators of installed capacities, while edges capture interdependencies among sectors. We formalize a damage propagation model in which the loss of capacity in one node dynamically affects connected components, revealing the topological patterns that drive systemic fragility. Comparative simulations demonstrate that CASA’s topology amplifies the impact of highly connected nodes, rendering them crucial for resilience planning. An application to a real-world case demonstrates how initial disruptions in access to drinking water cascade into governance, economic, and social instabilities. The results provide both theoretical and operational insights, highlighting that resilience depends not only on the strength of individual components but also on the network architecture that links them. CASA thus offers a replicable and data-informed approach for identifying drivers of social conflict and guiding anticipatory resilience strategies in complex territorial systems.