I'm wondering what role brain-drain plays in this catastrophe. Who wants to live at the border of chaos? Smart and open-minded people emigrate to Central/Northern Europe, US/Canada or Australia to live a much safer and fulfilling life. What remains is the conservative personality type (high dutifulness, low openness to experience, tight integration in communities), who is much more likely to reject democratic ideals and to accept theocratic dictatorships.

One might conclude that the only way to reliably stabilize such regions is to massively incentivize them for the personality types that have emigrated over the course of the past decades or centuries, even.