Civilisational collapse is the breakdown of social, political, and economic structures when the group solidarity that sustained them dissolves and is challenged by hungrier groups from the periphery.
Civilisational collapse is not a sudden event but a structural process. The group solidarity that enabled a civilisation’s rise gradually dissolves through sedentary comfort. The institutions that once coordinated collective action become rigid, self-serving, and disconnected from the populations they govern. The periphery, still forged in solidarity through shared hardship, develops the capacity to challenge the weakened centre.
The collapse is not total destruction but structural transformation. The specific institutions, power arrangements, and cultural forms of the old civilisation give way to new ones. The cycle resets: a new group with strong solidarity rises, builds, succeeds, softens, and eventually falls to the next group from the periphery.
In Ibn Khaldun’s analysis, civilisational collapse is inevitable within the cycle. Each civilisation carries the seeds of its own collapse in the very success that defines it. The collapse is not a failure of the civilisation but a consequence of its success: the comfort it produces destroys the solidarity that enabled it.