Civilizational turbulence as a transitional state of the global economy: structural factors and the mechanism of increasing instability

This article examines the structural factors and mechanisms underlying the growing instability of the global economy at the present stage. The article aims to develop a theoretical concept of "civilizational turbulence" as a transitional state of the global economy, allowing for the interpretation of current global instability not as another cyclical crisis, but as a structural and value transition between different civilizational structures. This goal seeks to identify the cumulative mechanism through which the overlap of technological, geopolitical, climatic, and value shifts leads to increased instability and a change in the architecture of the world order. The subject of this study is civilizational factors (value-cultural, institutional, geopolitical, technological, and socio-ecological) that determine the generation of turbulence, the fragmentation of economic space, the crisis of global governance, and the transition to a polycentric development model, where the logic of civilizational sovereignty and security becomes dominant. The methodological basis of the study consists of a civilizational approach, historical-genetic and comparative systems analysis, and a synergetic approach to the analysis of the nonlinear dynamics of complex systems. The study applies methods of multicriteria classification, aggregation of factors by levels of influence, and the construction of a conceptual scheme of the cumulative mechanism of turbulence growth. The fundamental inadequacy of the neoclassical and institutional approaches to explaining the current global instability is revealed, caused by ignoring civilizational capital, historical memory, and the value determinants of economic behavior. The author proposes a five-criteria classification of the factors of civilizational turbulence (by nature of origin, nature of influence, level of impact, duration, and place of occurrence). A three-level mechanism of turbulence generation is substantiated, including the structural-systemic, factor-process, and reflexive-institutional levels. For the first time, it has been demonstrated that the simultaneous overlap of structural shifts at all three levels triggers a self-sustaining positive feedback loop in which governance crises, value rifts, and deglobalization mutually reinforce each other. It has been demonstrated that this mechanism makes a return to the previous architecture of the world order impossible, and the modern global economy is naturally shifting toward a polycentric development model, where the logic of civilizational sovereignty and security, rather than global efficiency, becomes dominant.