As impostors seldom make lies to pass in the world, without putting false names upon things, [ . . . ] to persuade the people they ought not to defend their liberties, by giving the name of rebellion to the most just and honourable actions that have been performed for the preservation of them; and to aggravate the matter, fear not to tell us that rebellion is like the sin of witchcraft. But tho...

This paper x-rayed the effect of multinational oil companies on the chieftaincy institution in Bayelsa state, Nigeria. It reports that the multinational oil companies have unfavourably affected the chieftaincy institution in Bayelsa State through their developmental efforts and the youths of their host communities. Finally, the paper posits that despite the attendant recurrent rebellion and pro...

1 War in Africa, and in other parts of the world, has recently attracted significant attention given the cost of those conflicts in human lives and damage to national and regional economies. A growing and p roductive literature has emerged focussing on the motivations of rebels during these wars. Important econometric work has attempted to explain the economic and political motivations of rebel...

Rebel agents are intelligent agents that can oppose goals or plans assigned to them, or the general attitudes and/or behavior of other agents. They can serve purposes such as ethics, safety, and task execution correctness; enhance social co-creativity, and provide or support diverse points of view. We previously proposed a framework for AI rebellion and explored various scenarios that have posi...

During the 1940s-1970s, the leftist intelligentsia played a prominent role in constructing a vibrant Iraqi culture, contributed greatly to the flourishing of literature and the arts, and exerted a great impact in the cultural and political spheres. This article focuses primarily on the 1960s, when, despite two Ba’thist coups, the cultural ambience was pronouncedly leftist. The second half of th...

Sci-fi narratives permeating the collective consciousness endow AI Rebellion with ample negative connotations. However, for AI agents, as for humans, attitudes of protest, objection, and rejection have many potential benefits in support of ethics, safety, self-actualization, solidarity, and social justice, and are necessary in a wide variety of contexts. We launch a conversation on constructive...

This paper studies how cultural norms shaped by negative historical shocks can explain conflicts in the long-run. Exploiting a unique dataset constructed from historical archives, we test whether the Irish Famine (1845-1850), one of the most lethal starvation in history, changed political attitudes and contributed to the Irish Revolution (1913-1921). First, we investigate the determinants of jo...

As in the paper, suppose that allies use a threshold strategy according to which ally i supports the ruler if her signal ki is below some threshold k , ki ≤ k , and she rebels if ki > k . Since the signal ki is distributed uniformly on the interval [κ t − ε, κ + ε], a threshold signal k implies the existence of a threshold regime strength κ such that a rebellion fails if κ ≤ κ and succeeds if κ...