From Threat to Meta-Risk: Radicalisation, Agential Risk, and the Governance of Capability Formation
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18485/Keywords:
radicalisation, agential risk, capability formation, global catastrophic risk, deterrence by denial, security governanceAbstract
This is a conceptual, theory-building article; it does not offer an empirical demonstration that radicalisation amplifies catastrophic risk. It asks how social-level radicalisation should be conceptualised in an era in which dual-use technologies place high-consequence destructive capability within reach of sub-state actors, and where the resulting risk can still be governed. Using a documented structured qualitative synthesis across terrorism studies, existential-risk scholarship, climate-security research, deterrence theory and proliferation-financing governance, the article develops the construct of meta-risk: a persistent societal condition that raises the probability or severity of two or more causally independent hazard classes, principally by degrading the shared institutional capacities on which responses to all of them depend. It specifies necessary and sufficient conditions for the construct, a discriminating observable property separating it from threat multipliers and systemic vulnerability, and a mechanism linking population-level radicalisation to rare catastrophic capability formation without equating the two. The dependent phenomenon is bounded as global catastrophic-risk amplification rather than human extinction. The governance corollary situates financial controls as one layer within a rights-constrained, layered capability-governance architecture.
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