Tipping Point

Gregory Stanton's "Ten Stages of Genocide" models genocide as a set of recurring processes that appear across cases (e.g., Holocaust, Armenia, Cambodia), designed for early warning and prevention rather than post-hoc description. Stanton emphasizes the processes are often simultaneous, not strictly linear, and that each stage offers points for intervention (legal, political, security, and civil-society responses). It's widely used in education and atrocity-prevention work because it connects observable social/political signals (e.g., discrimination, dehumanization, organized militias) to escalation risk in a structured way.

Laurence (Lawrence) W. Britt compiled fourteen recurring characteristics he observed across multiple 20th-century fascist regimes (including Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, Franco's Spain, Suharto's Indonesia, and Pinochet's Chile), presenting them as a comparative pattern rather than a single doctrinal definition. The framework is used as a diagnostic checklist to spot when governance begins to resemble historical fascist models—especially when multiple traits cluster together (e.g., nationalism, scapegoating, media control, cronyism). It is most reliable when treated as pattern recognition across categories (state power, civil liberties, media, economy, enforcement), not as a single-issue test.

Ray Dalio's "Big Cycle" synthesizes long-run historical patterns in domestic order and disorder, linking economic conditions (debt, income distribution) and political conflict to a country's rise, peak, and decline. In his six-stage internal cycle, societies move from post-conflict consolidation to prosperity, then into excess, polarization, crisis, and (in worst cases) revolution or civil conflict. It's used as a macro early-warning lens because it ties measurable stresses (debt burdens, inequality, institutional strain, internal conflict) to recurring historical turning points rather than day-to-day politics.

Historian Timothy Snyder distills lessons from 20th-century European experiences with fascism and communism into practical warnings about how free societies slide toward authoritarianism. The "lessons" are civic and institutional: they emphasize how compliance, weakened institutions, propaganda, and paramilitary intimidation can normalize authoritarian power. The framework is useful because it translates historical patterns into concrete behaviors—what citizens, professionals, and institutions can notice and resist.

Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat synthesizes recurring tactics of modern authoritarian leaders ("strongmen") across cases from Mussolini onward, highlighting a toolkit used to gain and keep power. In her account, these tools reinforce each other: leaders elevate personal rule, tolerate or encourage violence, exploit corruption, and undermine civil liberties and accountability. The framework is useful as pattern recognition because it focuses on repeatable mechanisms of authoritarian consolidation rather than partisan outcomes.

In "Ur-Fascism" (1995), philosopher and semiotician Umberto Eco describes recurring features of "eternal fascism," drawn from historical fascist movements and his lived experience under Mussolini. Eco argues fascism is not a single fixed doctrine but a cluster of tendencies; not every case shows all features, yet the pattern is recognizable when multiple traits accumulate. The framework helps identify early fascist drift by focusing on cultural and political signals—mythic tradition, conspiracy thinking, scapegoating, and attacks on pluralism and critical language.