The advent of radical Islamist groups, the birth of Isis and many violent events in the last fifteen years – including the recent attacks in Paris – have shown that ideologies and emotions play central roles in issues related to political violence. On the one hand, it seems clear that massive violence, especially when used against civilians, creates strong emotions that can have dramatic effects on individual and political decisions. On the other hand, emotional shocks due to state policies that are considered illegitimate can lead individuals to radicalization. Likewise, many insurgent and terrorist groups develop their own ideologies and their strategy can sometimes be understood only taking into account the objectives proposed by those ideologies.

Nonetheless, most of the literature in social sciences on armed mobilization, civil wars and terrorism neglects the role of these non-material factors, focusing only on material factors and developing behavioral models in which rationality is defined in purely utilitarian terms. In a forthcoming piece, output of a project funded by ISRF, on International Security we develop a theory on the role of indignation and radical ideologies in the process of armed mobilization and we test our theory using historical quantitative and qualitative data about the Italian resistance movement against the Nazi-Fascist forces in World War II. We are currently working on a book project to expand our theory to different emotions and other empirical cases.