Self-immolators as a new social movement? An attempt to systemize phenomenon in integral and system conceptualization

In this paper an author highlight that political self-immolation has been occurring for nearly two thousand years and the main center of this phenomenon is in Asia. Unification of attitudes and globalization are factors that in a flash spread information around the world. This means that about self-immolation everyone, potentially, know in a minute after it occur. Against common knowledge self-immolation are done because of socio-political reasons, deeply altruistic and not because of psychological reasons or unadjustedness of self-immolators as proposed by representatives of nondemocratic regimes. Self-immolation phenomenon is worth of permanent observation by political scientists as they may lead to political changes of great importance as it was in Tunisia (2010). Those who have power and authority by breaking human rights are responsible for self-immolation acts.

System-based research remains an important yet usually outdated and internally contradictory approach in political science and international relations. Based on concepts borrowed from physiology, cybernetics, and general system theory, the system-based approach popularised in the 1960s was cast away as outdated and ill-focused. Despite those systems, the theory was developed in natural sciences, eventually creating a paradigm more applicable to domestic and international politics. The weakest element of past systems (like the one proposed by D. Easton) was that they did not allow for a sudden and catastrophic transformation and lacked emergence. This paper aims to present a model that would allow for the system’s ordinary and catastrophic transformation. The complex adaptive system features were defined using relevant literature on a paradigm of complexity. Connecting it with the propositions of D. Easton, R. Axelrod, and M. Cohen, as well as R. Jervis, such a model was constructed. The theoretical introduction is supplanted with a general case study of the early phases of the Arab Spring in Tunisia. The model mirrors the complex systems’ dynamics, considering the agent-structure problem.