Orientation Note: The Regime Degradation Sequence

Function in corpus

Reduces entry friction for the governance cluster's core diagnostic chain. Explains the sequential logic, clarifies what the sequence does and does not attempt, and prevents predictable misreadings.

Details

This orientation note is a reader guide for five papers that form a single explanatory chain: Witness Conditions (Paper 27), From Law to Logistics (Paper 31), The Handover Protocol (Paper 32), Legitimacy as a Finite Structural Resource (Paper 33), and Consequence-Path Audits (Paper 39). It introduces no new concepts and makes no independent arguments. Its purpose is to clarify how the papers relate, why they must be read in sequence, and what kind of work they are — and are not — attempting to do. The five papers constitute a diagnostic analysis of regime degradation under mediated, relocated, or temporally displaced decision-making. Each answers a question the previous paper makes unavoidable: Witness Conditions establishes the baseline; From Law to Logistics explains silent degradation; The Handover Protocol addresses formal handover as a legitimate survival maneuver; Legitimacy identifies the finite coordination resource whose depletion makes thinning terminal; Consequence-Path Audits explains why even a legitimate handover destabilizes adjacent regimes. The note also clarifies several important non-claims: the sequence does not argue against automation, does not privilege human judgment morally, and does not claim better audits would resolve the failures described. The analysis ends at diagnosis intentionally.

Availability

This paper is listed for orientation and dependency tracking. No public PDF or Zenodo record is linked yet.