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.

Thesis advisor: William Gamson / If anyone in the media were to openly claim that a political rally is "a rally is a rally," they would no doubt befall a windstorm of strong reactions from those who feel their contributions to politics and to the cause for which they are rallying uniquely important. Today, it is not only those on the left that would make this claim but also conservatives who have been defending their right to rally and forging their own brand of "grassroots". It is safe to say that no one would overtly make this claim, however the media's actions in this case are stronger than their words. Through the use of stale framing packages, the mainstream media is displaying that the "Restoring Honor Rally," the "One Nation Working Together March" and the "Rally to Restore Sanity/Fear" are essentially the same due to their nearly identical forms. Analysis of samples from the coverage of the three mega-rallies reveal what these media packages are and what issues go unnoticed as a result of such systematic reporting. Therefore, this paper goes about identifying those stale media frames, displaying the way in which the media relied upon the form of the events to dictate the nature of the reporting consequently hindering a deeper understanding of the functions. / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology.

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The thesis explores a 5-year period in the political history of Spain. It looks at a series of political processes and projects, beginning with the 15M/Indignados social movement. These projects go from 15M in 2011 to the creation of new digital platforms for participatory democracy for the city of Barcelona in 2016. The thesis defends the idea that these cases add up to a cycle of political contention, which is defined as “the 15M cycle of contention”. It supports the idea that a core thread throughout the cycle has been the challenging of the liberal representative model of democracy and some of its key social forms, primarily in discourse, but also in practice. The cases within the cycle vindicated, and experimented with, alternative forms and practices of democracy. Concretely, they tried to move away from the current liberal representative model, preeminent since XVIII century, towards a more participatory one. The thesis also defends the argument that a key driver of these democratic experiments has been “technopolitics”, otherwise, practices and processes that hybridize politics and technologies (particularly, information and communication technologies). The thesis focuses on three paradigmatic cases of the 15M cycle of contention: 15M itself, a social movement born in 2011; the X party, a new party created in 2013 by 15M activists; and Decidim.barcelona, a digital platform for participation, launched in early 2016 by the Barcelona City Council, designed by people involved in previous projects within the 15M cycle. The first of these three cases covers the sphere of social movements and civil society, the second, that of political parties, and the third, that of the State at the municipal level. I look at the discourses and the practices of democracy in these processes and projects, and whether they innovate or not in relation to pre-existing political forms in social movements, political parties, and the State. In every case I look at the technopolitics deployed by the actors involved. For analyzing such technopolitics, I look at three main elements: discourses, practices, and technological infrastructures. These are used, respectively, as the main entry into the semantics, the pragmatics and the syntax of technopolitics. As a complementary view, I look beyond the cases and into the cycle. Concretely, to the variations in discourses on democracy and technopolitical practices. I suggest that the cycle as a whole can be conceived as: a) a process of “reassembling of democracy”, a reassembling oriented towards a democratization of the political field (and society more broadly) beyond the liberal representative model; and b) as a case of “technopolitical contention”, in which political struggles have been organically connected to technological practices. Since, differently from traditional democratization processes from XVIII century onwards, this one has not been oriented to establish but to challenge the structures of liberal representative democracy (f.i.: the current structure and centrality of representation, traditional political parties, Parliaments, etc.), I define it as an attempt at “alter-democratization”. I also show that this alter-democratization process challenges not only the forms, but also the ontology of liberal representative democracy, concretely, some of its key subjective and collective forms, as well as its key modes of political relation. By looking at civil society, parties and State institutions I try to map changes in various areas of the political field in liberal democracies. In that sense, the cycle has pointed towards (although has not always succeeded in bringing about) alternative political ontologies and forms of life. In order to analyze both the cycle and the three key cases under study, I have recurred to a multi-method and multi-disciplinary approach. I have primarily relied on qualitative methods, such as participant observation, fieldwork, interviews, and digital materials (blog posts, journals, etc.). I spent more than 5 years as participant in various 15M cycle projects. Secondarily, I have used quantitative methods: along with fellow activists and researchers, in 2014 we ran a digital survey that gathered 1000+ responses among 15M participants. Finally, I have also used social network analysis methods to map activity on social networks. In terms of disciplines, I primarily draw resources from political science, sociology, philosophy, and STS.

The concept of social membership is the mainframe for this dissertation, which encompasses four independent articles that approach the boundaries of social membership from different perspectives. Empirically, the focus lies on mobilizing groups that demand an extension of rights and/or inclusion for documented and undocumented immigrants in two European immigration countries: Sweden and Spain. I have defined the processes through which mobilizing actors (immigrants themselves and diverse supporters of their cause) interact with boundary-making actors (institutional actors, policy makers), whom through their positions participate in drawing the boundaries between inclusion and exclusion, as negotiating social membership. To study these processes, I have performed 68 interviews with actors as mobilizing immigrants, activists mobilizing on behalf of immigrants, representatives of NGOs and trade unions, policy-makers and politicians. Two main types of claims appeared: undocumented migrants’ rights groups mobilizing for residence permits and social rights, and documented immigrants’ (and their supporters’) advocacy against ethnic discrimination. Furthermore, I have included a study that reflects the tensions over social membership within immigrant communities. The gendered dimension is its main focus, as it illustrates the value conflicts over gender equality and ethnic diversity brought to the surface through the debates following so-called honour killings in Sweden, and the difficulties faced by young immigrant women mobilizing simultaneously against racism and patriarchal oppression.  The thesis consists of four independent articles within the overall framework of mobilizing groups demanding extended rights for and/or inclusion of immigrants. By using immigrants’ rights mobilizations, negotiations, debates and agendas, my general aim has been to explore the processes through which social membership is being contested and negotiated by a wide range of actors. In doing so, it has been possible to reveal how legal and symbolic boundaries create exclusionary processes that pose constraints on the social membership of immigrants with different legal statuses. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following paper was unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 1: Manuscript.</p>

What explains the dynamics of contentious collective political action in post-Soviet Central Asia? How do post-Soviet Central Asian citizens negotiate the tensions between partaking in and abstaining from elite-challenging collective protests? By analysing cross-national attitudes in two Central Asian states, this article (1) systematically analyses the variation in collective protests by testing rival macro-, meso-, and micro-level theories; (2) reintroduces a conceptual and empirical distinction between low-risk and high-risk collective protests; and (3) examines the conditions under which individuals participate in two distinct types of elite-challenging collective actions. Three conclusions are reached. First, the evidence suggests that nuanced consideration of multi-level theoretical perspectives is necessary to explain contingencies of elite-challenging actions. Second, economic grievances and resource mobilization emerge as leading factors driving both low-risk and high-risk protests. Third, Islamic religiosity and social networking robustly predict participation in high-risk collective action.

In 2019, protests rippled across six continents affecting democracies and autocracies alike with such fervor that journalists repeatedly declared it the year of the street protest. Despite globalization and mobile technologies, contentious politics largely continue to take shape through the performances, narratives, and materialities of the street. That is, contentious politics take on particular place characteristics and thus must be studied in diverse places. This dissertation examines the contentious politics of Germany, a western democracy with a convoluted political history and memory culture. With its cautionary tale of the Nazi movement turned regime, Germany provides an especially valuable context within which to study social memory’s relationship with contentious politics. Based on ten months of fieldwork in Dresden, Berlin, and Munich, this dissertation demonstrates how contentious political actors engage in memory politics and perform, narrate, and employ the materialities of place to (re)mediate multiscalar memories. Inspired by Charles Tilly’s repertoires of contention, the stock of performances and tactics available to contentious political actors, the dissertation examines the role of place memories in present-day contentious politics through corporeal, spatial, and representational repertoires. Corporeal repertoires refer to repeat performances in which meaning making is achieved through the protesting body. As captivating as its visuality may be, it is often the protesting body’s aurality that first signals its presence to passersby. Music, from spontaneous to studio creations, are core to protest soundscapes and the efforts of contentious political actors to reconstruct place. Illustrated through original and appropriated songs, protesting bodies can wield music’s tripartite of meaning making—musical composition, lyrical content, and performance context—to build solidarity, recall a social memory, move bodies to desired political actions, or reimagine geographies. Spatial repertoires shift from the protesting body’s corporeality to its meaning making through mobility in urban space. Protesting bodies, as remembering bodies, occupy or weave together memory places to create new spatial narratives and in turn to (re)construct urban memoryscapes. As placelings, protesters mediate the connections between memory and place and engage in memory work for themselves, for the cities they envision, and/or for a larger imagined community. As exemplified through a historical spatial analysis of Munich digitally mapping 170 years of protest actions (1848–2019), certain places within a given locality become centers of contentious political action because of the deep histories they signify. Shifting from the visible protester to the concealed street artist, representational repertoires refer to meaning making through visual media intimately engaged with the materiality of place. Street art sometimes interacts with institutional memory sites (memory site interactant), but more often floats freely in the larger urban memoryscape thereby transforming liminal spaces into memory places (floating mnemonic actant). Already acknowledged for its placemaking capacity, street art’s mnemonic capacity to push, pull, and play with place memories is demonstrated through various examples commemorating anniversaries, drawing historical analogies, time-shifting historical figures, returning to “better” times, and crafting nascent memories. Evidenced by these chapters, German contentious politics, whether working for a cause or for a political identity, are steeped in social memories and rooted in the meaning making of place. Understood within the wider context of the present democratic crisis, I argue that social memory has become unmoored from the historical past and increasingly mythic in character, especially on the right. Just as democracy suffers from post-truthism and tribalism, so too does social memory. In fact, the memory problem may very well be exacerbating the democratic one. The presence of this problem in Germany, a nation so praised for its memory culture and handling of its dark past, casts great doubt on what constitutes a healthy memory culture. To restore the health of liberal democracies, societies must revisit their relationship to the past. / Media & Communication

Twentieth century has seen a significant number of social changes, taking in different forms of revolution, revolts and protests. Nevertheless, as the world stabilized with the termination of Cold War, contention also seemed to have died down. Dominating theories concluded with generalizations that contentions are inevitable process of social change; it comes and goes. South Korea, on the other hand, remains an anomaly due to contentious actors’ persisting influence in the society. In reality, contention does not exist in isolation from the society, but arises from the very soil of it. South Korea actors, the institutions and parties reflecting contentious identity attests its protracted existence beyond the contentious episodes. I argue that contentious politics is not an isolated event that belongs in the transitionary period, but is capable of creating a continuously interacting variable in the society. Thus, in the case of South Korea and its protracted democratization, contention needs to be understood as an organic product of South Korean history that continues to influence the contentious identity to fulfill their self-perceived historical duty of achieving a legitimate government. / 2023-12-30

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This dissertation uses a relational approach and a contentious politics framework to examine the archaeological record. Methodologically, it merges spatial and social network analyses to promote a geosocial archaeology. Combined, the articles create a counter-narrative that highlights how environmentally focused investigations fail to explain how and why societies in the Southwest often reorganize horizontally. The first article uses geosocial networks, which I argue represent memory maps, to reveal that the socially important, and sophisticated, act of forgetting was employed by people in the Gallina region during A.D. 1100 - 1300. A concomitant community level, settlement pattern analysis demonstrates similarities between the arrangement of Gallina and Basketmaker-era settlements. These historically situated settlement structures, combined with acts of forgetting, were used by Gallina region residents to institute and maintain a horizontally organized social movement that was likely aimed at rejecting the hierarchical social atmosphere in the Four Corners region. The second article proposes that as ideologically charged material goods are consumed, fissures within past ideological landscapes are revealed and that these fissures can demonstrate acts of resistance in the archaeological past. It also contends that social and environmental variables need to be combined for these conflicting religious and political practices to be correctly interpreted. The third article applies many of the ideas outlined in the second article to a case study in the Greater Southwest during A.D. 1200 - 1450. Fractures in the ideological landscape demonstrate that the Salado Phenomenon was a religious social movement formed around, and successful because of, its populist nature. Based on variations in how the Salado ideology interacted with contemporaneous hierarchical and non-hierarchical religious and political organizations it is probable that the Salado social movement formed around desires for the open access to religious knowledge.