Abstract for: A General Theory of Societal Governance and Power Dynamics of Extremist Groups

How do extremist groups gain power within communities that aren’t ideologically inclined to support those groups? This paper describes a dynamic theory of the general phenomena that give rise to active support for extremist groups. We focus on extremist groups seeking to garner support from the local community by providing services and dispensing their brand of justice and law. We describe the theory based on a nonspecific extremist-group model. We are currently working on transferring this general theory to a computational system dynamics model that can be used as a base for simulating a variety of scenarios and extremist groups.