Modeling Contentious Politics: The case of civil strife and radicalization in the Middle East and North Africa

This dissertation introduces instruments of agent-based modeling into the literature of contentious politics and broadens the application of game theory and quantitative analytical tools in this field. This work is composed of three working papers that focus specifically on the following topics: • In the first paper, I present a dynamic agent-based model encompassing the most important and up-to-date findings in the field of contentious politics and synthesize them within one homogeneous theoretical framework. After providing the theoretical description of the model, I run computer simulations to test the concrete functioning of the theoretical dynamics within it and find consistent analogies with real-world events. • In the second paper, I analyze the influence of socioeconomic inequality on individuals’ participation in contentious episodes. I do so by analyzing the socioeconomic trends that characterized three Arab countries – Tunisia, Egypt, and Jordan – during the decade that preceded the 2011 uprisings and the social characteristics of those who participated in the subsequent protests, as they emerged in the 2011 wave of the Arab Barometer surveys. • In the third paper, I provide an overview of the relatively limited literature that applies the principles of game theory to the study of political or religious radicalization. After describing its main findings, I suggest how Rapoport’s seminal work on the historical “waves of terrorism” can be treated dynamically through some fundamental game-theoretic principles such as coordination problems, Thomas Shelling’s focal points and in the solutions proposed by the literature on correlated equilibria.