Integrating Structural Theories of Revolution with Evolutionary Models to Predict Societal Resilience and (in) Stability
Abstract
Recent years have seen major political crises throughout the world including the popular insurrections of the Arab Spring, civil wars in Africa (Nigeria, South Sudan, Mali, the Central African Republic), a collapse of democracy in Thailand and Turkey, a civil war in Ukraine, and ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq. The next five to twenty years are almost universally expected to see rising tensions both within and between countries. Being able to predict future crises in the world and the resilience of different countries to various shocks (political, economic, environmental, and health-related) is of foremost importance for advancing and defending the national interests of the US and its allies. In this project, we will leverage and advance recent and current DoD investments in the study of societal resilience by integrating structural theories of revolution from political science with recent advances in theoretical biology, economics, sociology, psychology, and cultural evolution. Revolutions are complex emergent processes driven by a combination of both structural and transient forces. Goldstone s structural-demographic theory has been successfully applied to various civil wars, revolutions, and rebellions over the last 500 years. However, his original formulation is qualitative and thus only allows for qualitative explanation of the events that have happened but not for quantitative predictions. There is also a great body of recent work focusing on transient forces and changes in individual behaviors caused by Òmass-actionÓ and ÒbandwagonÓ effects, preference falsification, and social identity linkages leading to mass protests and revolutions. This latter work however ignores structural-demographic changes. Our overall goal here is to combine and extend these different approaches to modeling revolutions in order to achieve better predictive power. Various structural and transient causes of a revolutionary situation operate on different time scales. Demographic changes occur on the slowest ÒmacroÓ scale. The growth in political and economic inequality among the elites and the general population groups takes place on the intermediate ÒmesoÓ scale. The psychological perception of the ongoing political and/or economic situation and the strength of political support for government and opposition can change very rapidly on the fastest ÒmicroÓ scale. Correspondingly, we will apply different modeling approaches for each of these time scales. We will use both simple analytical approximations and complex agent-based simulations. To validate, parameterize, and test our models, we will use data (direct or proxy) from Egypt, Ukraine, and Saudi Arabia. We will use a variety of open sources and work closely with experts on each of these three countries. Our proposed work will yield new and more powerful modeling tools enabling analysts to assess risks for political stability posed by intra-elite divisions, various extremist groups, and external and internal shocks. Such shocks could include certain policy changes, economic recession, exogenous events increasing the price of consumables, decreases in the demand for labor as a result of automation, economic sanctions, or overproduction of university graduates, and/or illness of the leader or assassination attempts on his or her life, as well as any events changing publicly available information or causing erosion in the strength of social norms. Although our main focus will be on modeling revolutions and the resilience of human societies to shocks, the theoretical and modeling approaches we plan to develop will also have numerous applications and relevance for a number of fundamental sciences including evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology, economics, organization research, political science, and history.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Oct 16, 2018
- Source ID
- W911NF1810138
Entities
People
- Sergey Gavrilets
Organizations
- Army Contracting Command
- United States Army
- University of Tennessee