Birds of a Feather Protest Together: Theorizing Self-Organizing Political Protests with Flock Theory

Devan Rosen, Jang Hyun Kim, Yoonjae Nam

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

13 Scopus citations

Abstract

The current research theorizes decentralized and self-organized political protests via flock theory (Rosen 2002), a theory of emergent self-organization in communicative human interaction. Flock theory draws from a theoretical basis of emergence and self-organizing systems, and is presented as a theory of decentralized communication structures. Focusing on the optimization of decentralized networks and roadmap based coordination of organizationally homopholous foci; the current theory poses a model of human interaction that captures the potentially egalitarian effects of cooperative evolution and collective action. Case studies of two separate decentralized political protests against Korean government and FARC are offered as evidences of such phenomena.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)419-441
Number of pages23
JournalSystemic Practice and Action Research
Volume23
Issue number5
DOIs
StatePublished - 2010
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Decentralized networks
  • Flock theory
  • Political protests
  • Self-organizing systems
  • Social networks

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