Search Results for « Uncertainty relations »

Crisis management has become a core strategic capability in an era characterized by systemic volatility, intensifying geopolitical rivalry, accelerating technological disruption, and deepening global interdependence. The contemporary ecology of uncertainty – shaped by escalating geopolitical tensions, recurrent climate-induced disasters, digitally amplified sociocultural fragmentation, and the erosion of institutional trust – poses profound challenges to established models of governance and leadership at both domestic and international levels. This chapter offers a critical examination of the conceptual evolution of crisis management by integrating foundational typologies, theoretical frameworks, and seminal contributions from crisis decision-making theory, resilience governance, complex adaptive systems, and international crisis diplomacy. It situates crisis management firmly within the field of International Relations, demonstrating how crises increasingly transcend territorial boundaries and require coordinated, multi-actor responses involving states, international organizations, and transnational networks. Grounded primarily in International Relations theories – while integrating insights from political science, organizational sociology, communication studies, and public management – the chapter offers a comprehensive analysis of emerging vulnerabilities and the capabilities required to manage disruptive events within multilevel governance systems. It concludes by advancing a set of strategic recommendations tailored to diplomatic higher education institutions, emphasizing their essential responsibility in preparing future diplomats and practitioners of international security and global crisis governance to operate effectively within an environment marked by permanent uncertainty and increasingly complex global governance architectures.

In the century and a half since Maxwell first conjured his “finite being” which Lord Kelvin subsequently dubbed a “daemon”, researchers have explored the connections between non-equilibrium thermodynamics, entropy, and information theory. In recent years various Thermodynamic Uncertainty Relations (TURs) have been derived to inform upon the relationship between the entropy production and the precision possible in thermodynamic machines and processes. In this paper the recently derived TURs are applied to the hypothetical thermodynamic economy as described by Parker [1]. The TURs define the lower bound on the total entropy production of the economy. Changes in this entropy production rate has consequences on the stability of the economic system and plays a central role in the business cycle. This new perspective has important implications for policy makers, researchers, and other economic actors.

Frank Knight was one of the twentieth century’s most illustrious economic thinkers. His writings and enquiry into the nature of method, theory and knowledge in relation to the activities of social actors, and under what circumstances and with what limitations we might adequately theorise social agency, bequeathed a rich tradition of theoretical and practical insight. Many of his writings centred on the issue of risk and uncertainty, how social actors anticipate the future and manage and mediate terrains of uncertainty and risk, and in doing so change the outcomes that obtain. Knight’s contributions essentially constructed a means for assessing and measuring risk in various facets of social activity, seeding insights which remain pertinent today. As the article notes, however, despite Knight’s insights and the methodological schema he constructed for probability analysis, remarkably few social sciences – including international relations – have mined his work. Ironically, much that we need to know to more effectively theorise and accommodate the conundrums of risk and uncertainty into social scientific methods Knight long ago handed down to us.

We consider the uncertainty between two pairs of local projective measurements performed on a multipartite system. We show that the optimal bound in any linear uncertainty relation, formulated in terms of the Shannon entropy, is additive. This directly implies, against naive intuition, that the minimal entropic uncertainty can always be realized by fully separable states. Hence, in contradiction to proposals by other authors, no entanglement witness can be constructed solely by comparing the attainable uncertainties of entangled and separable states. However, our result gives rise to a huge simplification for computing global uncertainty bounds as they now can be deduced from local ones. Furthermore, we provide the natural generalization of the Maassen and Uffink inequality for linear uncertainty relations with arbitrary positive coefficients.