Date: May 22, 2015 Time: 12:20-14:30 Venue: Building 8, Room 206, Komaba Campus, UTokyo Language: English ![]() Framing strategy and citizen's behavior - Computational approaches to area studies How are strategies that lead social movements to success shaped? This paper takes up the Bolivian case to explore how the single-identity strategy was changed to the multiple-identity strategy and what affected social conditions. As many know, the Bolivian revolution in 1952 succeeded with the single-identity, that is, mineworkers. However, after neoliberal reforms, mineworkers lost their political power and then this strategy had become no longer effective. In the midst of it, in 2000, the unprecedented-scale movement, the Water War, occurred and resulted in political changes. In the Water War, a new strategy was adopted to mobilize people - the multiple-identity, which united peasants, informal workers and indigenous people altogether. Why and how was the strategy changed?
Despite many excellent researches on the Water War, it is not clear which factor most affected the emergence of this new strategy. Previous studies primarily contend failure of single-identity strategy of movement activists and emphasizing citizens’ indigenous identity. This paper, as complementing previous researches, intends to compare the influence of the behavior of movement activists and citizens, respectively, by using the Multi-Agent Simulation(MAS). MAS is a computational approach to create a virtual society. With a MAS model constructed by fieldwork data, this paper first compares the influence of these factors by recreating Bolivian social movements and then experiments the counterfactual by adding and subtracting each factor to discover which factor most affects the emergence of a new strategy. |