The Drivers of Grievance and Unrest in the World’s Populations: Understanding Instability, Terrorism, and Migration

Speaker: Dr. Lawrence Kuznar (NSI, Inc.)

Date: 20 December 2019

Speaker Session Preview

SMA hosted a speaker session presented by Dr. Lawrence Kuznar (NSI, Inc.) as a part of its SMA CENTCOM Speaker Series.

During his presentation, Dr. Kuznar discussed his team’s findings regarding the drivers of grievance and unrest among the world’s populations, particularly as they relate to instability, terrorism, and migration. He first spoke about the primary inspiration for his team’s research: SMA’s “Age of Disruption” white paper. This white paper suggests that populations are key battlefields in global power competition, as great powers vie for the allegiance of populations, manipulate the grievances of these populations, and have objectives that can be frustrated by social unrest among these populations. He also stated that the Political Instability Task Force’s (PITF) work on social unrest events and predicting instability inspired his team’s work as well. Next, Dr. Kuznar conveyed that the purpose of NSI’s aggrieved populations project was to anticipate the operational environment from 2019 to 2029 by identifying emerging regional and non-state challenges. This effort was broken up into two phases: a global analysis phase and a country-specific analysis phase. He then presented a notional graph depicting the distribution of social status and wealth of a typical society and explained the concepts of risk aversion and risk acceptance. For the remainder of his brief, Dr. Kuznar discussed his team’s results, beginning with those from his team’s global study, which included the following: 1) Political instability is driven by hunger, risk acceptant elites, the interaction of fuel export and corruption, weak democracy, mountainous terrain, economic isolation, and ethnic division; and 2) migration from undeveloped countries is driven by hunger, a youth bulge, homicide, and political oppression. He concluded by discussing the results of their country-specific study, which included the following: 1) Countries with low inequality, such as Finland, are stable; 2) countries with unusually high levels of inequality, such as Honduras and South Africa, are characterized by extremely high levels of interpersonal violence; and 3) agrarian countries have extremely high levels of inequality and consequently experience unrest in rural areas, which in turn is exacerbated by rural/urban inequalities (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Honduras, Nigeria, and Ethiopia are good examples).

Speaker Session Audio Recording

Briefing Materials

Biography:

Lawrence A. Kuznar (Chief Cultural Sciences Officer, NSI,Inc., Professor of Anthropology, Purdue University-Fort Wayne) Dr. Kuznar conducts anthropological research relevant to counterterrorism and other areas of national security. His research ranges from advanced statistical and geographical modeling of social instability, to discourse analysis of adversaries including North Korea, China, Russia, Iran, and ISIS (Daesh) to provide leading indicators of intent and behavior. He has developed computational models of genocide in Darfur and tribal factionalism in New Guinea, mathematical models of inequality and conflict, and integrated socio-cultural databases for geo-spatial analysis of illicit nuclear trade and bioterrorism. Dr. Kuznar’s recent research has been funded by academic sources, the Office of the Secretary of Defense Strategic Multi-Layer Analysis, Air Force Research Lab (AFRL), the Human Social Cultural Behavior (HSCB) modeling program of the Department of Defense, and by the US Army Corps of Engineers. He has also served on the HSCB Technical Progress Evaluation panel and a National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) net assessment panel. He conducted extensive research among the Aymara of southern Peru and with the Navajo in the American southwest. Dr. Kuznar has published and edited several books and numerous peer-reviewed articles in journals such as American Anthropologist, Current Anthropology, Social Science Computer Review, Political Studies, Field Methods, and Journal of Anthropological Research. Dr. Kuznar earned his Ph.D. and M.A. in Anthropology, and a M.S. in Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences from Northwestern University. His B.A. in Anthropology is from Penn State.

This speaker session supported SMA’s CENTCOM project. For additional speaker sessions and project publications, please visit the CENTCOM project page.