Japan faces various risks which can threaten sustainability of society and economy. They include, for example, declining and ageing population, huge public debt, international political tension in east Asia, and natural disasters due to big earthquakes and global warming.
     In our attempt to mitigate various risks in our daily lives, we often form networks such as families and communities to help each other when some negative shocks occur.  However, such indivdidual networks are usually too small to deal with the big risks which can endanger the sustainability of our society.  The state is expected play roles of mitigatingating such big risks.
     Contrary to such expectation, the government can sometimes create crises (e.g., finacial crisis, fiscal crisis, and civil wars). The nature of the state, especially whether it is democratic or not, affects formation of networks in the society and thus affects the way the society controls risks. History tells us that democratic states can cause wars and conflicts while authoritarian states can sometimes privent them; and that democratization can increase the risk of conflicts and often entail civil wars especially when societies are ethnically divided.
　　If states, which are expected to play the role of reducing risks in the society, increase some risks of our society, how should we design our social and political institutions? We believe such a question is an important one because many societies are now facing problems which can threaten their sustainability.
     Our research project, which we call the "RND Project", tries to clarify the relationship among Risk, Network and Democracy, and show how we should design institutions to reduce risks, with special attention to the risks of natural disasters, economic crisis, and various conflicts to illustarate and to find out how our theories can be applied to actural social problems.