Abstract

The concept of civilization has long occupied a central place in historical, sociological, and anthropological inquiry. Classical theories frequently portrayed civilizations as coherent cultural entities, developmental stages, or large-scale historical organisms. More recent scholarship, however, has emphasized fragmentation, power asymmetries, colonial entanglements, epistemic plurality, and the contested nature of social order. This article proposes a relational theory of civilizational intelligence that seeks to bridge these traditions without reducing civilizations to unified organisms or deterministic historical trajectories. Rather than treating civilizations as bounded entities possessing collective minds, the article conceptualizes them as contested relational assemblages composed of heterogeneous actors, institutions, knowledge systems, infrastructures, ecological processes, and power relations. Civilizational intelligence is defined as the capacity of these assemblages to negotiate complexity, manage conflict, integrate diverse forms of knowledge, respond to socio-ecological transformations, and sustain conditions for collective adaptation under uncertainty. Drawing on complexity theory, political ecology, critical governance studies, anthropology, and decolonial scholarship, the article develops a multidimensional framework organized around relational adaptation, epistemic plurality, power-sensitive governance, ecological embeddedness, collective learning, and anticipatory coordination. Comparative illustrations from historical and contemporary societies demonstrate how adaptive capacities emerge not from systemic coherence alone but from the dynamic interaction of cooperation, contestation, and institutional transformation. The article argues that future civilizational resilience in the Anthropocene will depend less on technological sophistication or economic expansion than on the capacity to navigate diversity, inequality, ecological constraints, and planetary interdependence. In this sense, civilizational intelligence is not a property of civilizations as unified entities but an emergent and continuously negotiated process operating across multiple scales of human organization.

Keywords: Civilization, Civilizational intelligence, Complexity science, Complex adaptive systems, Resilience, Systems thinking, Anthropocene, Planetary boundaries, Governance, Sustainability, Adaptive learning, Epistemic diversity, Earth system governance, Multiple modernities, Planetary intelligence