Abstract:

The paper uses the case of organized politically motivated violence to explore the conceptual linkages existing between the inter-agent and agent levels of Sun’s hierarchy for agent based modeling of social dynamics.  This addresses, in a modest way, the issue of disciplines “talking past each other”.  Specifically, social mobilization theory, which has a long history in social science, is shown to be compatible with Castelfranchi and Paglieri’s model of belief-based goal processing drawn from cognitive science.  The case of Provisional Irish Republicanism is then used to demonstrate the framework’s usefulness for describing individual (agent) micro motivations that aggregate to form social movements displaying shared goals.