Social disruption

Social disruption is a term used in sociology to describe the alteration, dysfunction or breakdown of social life, often in a community setting. Social disruption implies a radical transformation, in which the old certainties of modern society are falling away and something quite new is emerging. Social disruption might be caused through natural disasters, massive human displacements, rapid economic, technological and demographic change but also due to controversial policy-making.

Social disruptions are for example rising sea levels that are creating new landscapes, drawing new world maps whose key lines are not traditional boundaries between nation-states but elevations above sea level. On the local level, an example would be the closing of a community grocery store, which might cause social disruption in a community by removing a "meeting ground" for community members to develop interpersonal relationships and community solidarity.

Results of social disruption

"We are wandering aimlessly and dispassionately, arguing for and against, but the one statement on which we are, beyond all differences and over many continents, to be able to agree on, is: "I can no longer understand the world".

Social disruptions often lead to five social symptoms: frustration, democratic disconnection, fragmentation, polarization and escalation. Studies from the last decade show, that our societies have become more fragmented and less coherent (e.g. Bishop 2008), neighbourhoods turning into little states, organizing themselves to defend the local politics and culture against outsiders (Walzer 1983; Bauman 2017) and increasingly identifying through ways of voting, lifestyle or wellbeing (e.g. Schäfer 2015).