Fundamental Issues
Researchers explore how extreme governments take root
By Inga Kiderra, USC News Service
Fundamentalism happens. And not only in the least-developed corners of the world. According to Todd Sandler and Daniel Arce, it can and does happen here, whenever and wherever a group refuses to take any less than the lion’s share of the social pie.
Sandler, of USC College, and Arce, of Rhodes College in Memphis, Tenn., outline their ideas in the paper “An Evolutionary Game Approach to Fundamentalism and Conflict.”
The duo began their research shortly after the collapse of Afghanistan’s Taliban government. Why, they wondered, did it fall so fast? And how did it come to power at all?
“We set out to determine what causes nations to take on extreme views, by creating mathematical models of the world we see,” says Arce. “How is it, for example, that the Taliban took control of a country that did not share its views? How did the Nazis manage to hold sway in Germany? [Saddam] Hussein in Iraq?”
Sandler, who holds the Robert R. and Katheryn A. Dockson Chair in Economics and International Relations, says he and Arce also were interested in checking whether intolerance was a help or hindrance in the fundamentalist cause.
The pair ran an evolutionary game analysis and came to a startling conclusion: Fundamentalists are empowered by the selfish strategies of moderates.
“Intolerance works against fundamentalists taking over a population—except when non-fundamentalists mimic the traits of fundamentalists to fit in,” Sandler says. As fundamentalists gain a foothold in society and begin to have “some status or prevalence from which to build,” non-fundamentalists encounter them more frequently and are tempted to pretend ideological kinship in order to secure a better deal for themselves. “They mimic the signals—think burka or beard—to get ahead,” he says.
Arce and Sandler describe fundamentalism in terms of group cohesiveness and an inability to compromise. “Basically, fundamentalists are people who want their views to be supreme,” Sandler says. This definition encompasses not only the Taliban and acknowledged dictators such as Hussein, but also close-knit sets of like-minded leaders that run corporate units.
“Even U.S. administrations since the end of the Cold War are not entirely exempt,” Sandler says. “Because there are no longer two superpowers, there’s a belief that we can act with impunity on the global stage. When it comes to international dealings, we tend to display fundamentalist traits.”
Arce and Sandler’s work on fundamentalism and conflict can be used as a predictive tool. If a group is largely composed of falsifiers, it’s as easy to bring down as the house of cards that it is. On the other hand, if you’re contending with believers, the task will be considerably more difficult.
The Arce/Sandler model also has important implications for how war is conducted. Take, for instance, an example from World War II. “If a population, like that of Imperial Japan, is a believing one, one has to do something really dramatic to win,” Sandler says. “Whereas in Germany, we only had to have a military victory.”
Knowing which state of affairs is which is not always clear-cut. Accurate intelligence is critical, and though the model cannot substitute, it can, Arce says, “indicate to policymakers where the trouble spots are on the globe so they can head off conflict before it ever develops.”
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