Study the break, not the spectacle.
Eleven scenario studies ask what actually has to change for pressure to become political rupture: institutional loyalty, administrative capacity, security cohesion, legal recognition, payments, services, and credible off-ramps.
Read across all eleven scenarios.
Cross-scenario findings, institutional dimensions, and the full comparison matrix.
Open briefing →Indicator frameworkSeparate signal from spectacle.
Paired pressure/capacity measures, false positives, and cross-system phase-change indicators.
Open indicators →What actually moves the outcome
No single variable is treated as a revolution switch. The supplied studies repeatedly converge on coupled institutional behavior.
Courts, legislatures, administrations, states, and fiscal systems continue to recognize a common legal order—or they stop.
Individual refusal matters less than durable organizational realignment behind incompatible civilian authority.
Scale, persistence, coalition breadth, and the relationship between peaceful mass action and violent factions alter both legitimacy and state response.
Elections, courts, succession, bargaining, verified information, and normal funding mechanisms can absorb shocks before they become sovereign fracture.
Scenarios
Each page separates baseline institutional effects from high-severity tails and lists the source dossiers used.
Mass Nonviolent Paralysis
A sustained nationwide protest-and-strike wave can generate a major political and economic crisis without automatically producing constitutional collapse. The decisive threshold is whether mass dissent becomes durable institutional disaggregation.
Study 02Mass Uprising → Armed Escalation
The armed-uprising paper finds that scale alone is not the key determinant of revolutionary success. State cohesion, elite fracture, administrative control, and security-force alignment dominate the political outcome while violence sharply increases human and economic costs.
Study 03Youth Uprising Contagion
A global wave of youth-led uprisings can transmit symbols, grievances, and expectations quickly without creating a centrally coordinated international movement. In the U.S. scenario, heterogeneity and the interaction of scale, persistence, state response, and weaponization determine the branch.
Study 04Executive Self-Coup / Institutional Capture
The key distinction is between a strong or norm-breaking executive operating inside a competitive constitutional order and a transformation in which independent veto points can no longer make resistance effective or political power cannot reliably change hands.
Study 05Contested Succession / Dual Claims
Two people can assert presidential authority, but competing claims do not become dual sovereignty unless significant institutions begin performing governmental functions under incompatible chains of recognition.
Study 06Security-Sector Command Fracture
Security-sector fragmentation is a more serious indicator of constitutional stress than another increment of protest participation, but isolated refusals do not create a new government. The critical question is whether durable organizations accept incompatible civilian authorities.
Study 07Federal–State Sovereignty Fracture
Aggressive federal-state conflict is not itself sovereign fracture. The threshold is crossed when important institutions stop accepting a common mechanism of legal finality and can operationalize mutually incompatible commands over the same people, territory, assets, or institutions.
Study 08Catastrophic Leadership Loss
A no-warning loss or isolation of senior federal leadership would create a continuity-of-authority crisis, not automatic legal extinction of the government. Ambiguous status—missing, incapacitated, unreachable, or unconfirmed—creates harder problems than confirmed vacancies.
Study 09Fiscal–Administrative Breakdown
A severe funding and administrative breakdown can cripple government capacity without abolishing offices, statutes, courts, state governments, mandatory programs, or constitutional authority. Sovereignty risk requires failures far beyond an appropriations lapse.
Study 10Foreign-Amplified Legitimacy Fracture
Foreign actors are modeled as accelerants of a genuine domestic legitimacy crisis, not as omnipotent creators of one. The strategic danger is epistemic: authentication, attribution, and shared situational awareness degrade precisely when institutions need to distinguish lawful authority from noise.
Study 11Resistance, Arms & Constitutional Legitimacy
The legal-history papers distinguish an anti-tyranny rationale in founding-era political thought from a present-day legal right to organize private armed rebellion. The analytical value is in separating political theory, constitutional history, positive law, and empirical claims.
Continue through linked mechanisms, institutions, outcomes, cases, law, and glossary entries built from the same report corpus.