Haile Selassie was the Emperor of Ethiopia during its last great feudal dynasty until 1974 when it was overthrown. Ryszard Kapuscinski uses a combination of fictional narrative and historical accounts to describe the Emperor.
The significance of the book The Emperor was that it gave a compelling account of the internal logic of Ethiopia. The internal logic of Ethiopia existed through the extraction of economic value from their population and the suppression of efforts to move towards inclusive political and social institutions which threaten their position.
Ethiopia exemplifies the suppression of emergent systemic change because of their social classes. They had an powerful and rich elite class which benefited from the economic structure. Through this they were able to suppress any emergent systemic change, so that they could continue to benefit themselves. This made it so they could not create more equal economic and social institutions.
A complex adaptive system is a type of complex non-linear system. It is seen in many systems around the environment such as ecosystems, rivers, the human brain, flocks of birds, the climate, and the weather.
Some of a complex adaptive system’s important features are that they are difficult or impossible to predict in detail, you are able to make broad brush predictions about the system as a whole, they have emergent properties, they tend towards greater complexity, and the systems do not tend towards an equilibrium. First, they are difficult or impossible to predict in detail because they are nonlinear systems. One small change in one part of the system can set off a chain of events, and this idea is often called the butterfly effect. Second, You can make broad brush predictions about the system as a whole because in detail these systems are unpredictable, and an example of this would be like predicting the weather. Third, they have emergent properties because no individual agent is specifically linked to the patterns, there are many moving parts that come together such as brain cells in a brain, and molecules in the weather. Fourth, complex adaptive systems tend towards greater complexity because many complexity adaptive systems are fast evolving and are the opposite of simple economics models. Finally, these systems do not tend towards an equilibrium. An example of this that was given was coevolution.