From Dynamic Equilibrium to Sustainable Disequilibrium: Rethinking Democracy as a Form of Governance in a Complex Adaptive System

The article investigates in depth, from the perspective of complex adaptive social systems, the transition to democracy and the instability problems that have emerged in the twenty-first century. It demonstrates that the resilience or degradation of democratic institutions cannot be fully explained solely by institutional design or the political will of leaders, but should be understood as structural tension arising in transitions between two regimes of systemic functioning of the governance metasystem: dynamic equilibrium and sustainable disequilibrium.To address this, the study employs the conceptual framework of the unity and tension between systematization and factorization in stabilizing activity. It introduces a novel mechanism of structural differentiation between Lead Link (LL) and Representative Link (RL) functions, and develops the understanding of the role of negative and positive feedback in ensuring distributed regulation, direct sensitivity to environmental states, and the institutionalized processing of conflicts as sources of adaptation and innovation. The analysis shows that the future viability of democracy depends not only on institutional restructuring of the governance metasystem but also on the worldview capacities of social actors.This contribution builds upon but also extends existing frameworks such as Beer’s Viable System Model and Luhmann’s theory of autopoietic social systems offering a more granular mechanism for understanding the evolutionary shift from dynamic equilibrium to sustainable disequilibrium in social metasystems. Comparative analysis of Switzerland, Poland, and Serbia illustrates how democratic resilience is shaped less by formal constitutional attributes than by embedded local self-government, separation of governance and representation, and effective feedback mechanisms.