Speaker: Dr Nils Mallock, King’s College London
Date: Tuesday 29 September 2026
Time: 16.00–17.30
Venue: Online
Registration: To register, email [email protected]
Abstract
Conventional wisdom, prominent theories of human behaviour, and standard approaches to policymaking often assume that individuals engage or disengage from collective action based on instrumental reasoning: they anticipate benefits (to their group or themselves), weigh costs and risks, and can be deterred through material incentives and sanctions. While this mechanism holds for various behaviours, including low-risk protest engagement, an increasing amount of evidence suggests that decision-making follows different patterns when the stakes are extreme – such as when protesting in repressive political contexts or when engaging in violent conflict. In this session, we will explore this research covering peaceful and severely conflict-affected environments around the world, including Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Hong Kong, Chile, the Netherlands and various other places. We will discuss the tension between instrumental and moral psychological motives for political action, why traditional models fail in high-risk contexts, and what this means for our understanding of human behaviour in conflict.
About the speaker
Dr Nils Mallock is a behavioural scientist of political violence and peace at the Centre for Statecraft and National Security (https://csns.uk/team/nils-mallock/) at King’s College London. He is a Fellow on the UK Foreign Office-funded XCEPT research programme (https://www.xcept-research.org/), and Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (https://www.lse.ac.uk/people/nils-mallock). His work examines the drivers of collective action, protests and revolutionary violence, based on years of fieldwork and leading large-scale quantitative studies and interviews in the Middle East and East Asia. Nils regularly briefs the UK government on foreign and security policy issues.