 Sociopolitical dynamics refers to the major components, relations and patterns within a political system that defines its overall workings and process of development. A political system is a set of institutional structures through which members make collective decisions. Political dynamics refers to the patterns of interrelationships between those elements that define how the system evolves over time. In the ongoing evolution of political institutions into larger systems, sub-political organizations come into contact and must define some overall system of coordination between them. How the different parts then interrelate, whether through conflict or consensus, becomes a critical factor in determining the future dynamics within the system and how it evolves. The central question in the study of the evolution of political systems is how do we go from small political systems based on personal ties to a modern political system based on a set of institutions that are impersonal. As the political scientist Francis Fukuyama stated it, one of the things that we have to figure out is how is it that you get from a form of social organization that is basically based on friendships and family to one that is impersonal, that treats people not because I know you and we have exchange favours, or you are my cousin or my nephew or something, but get to a state where people are simply treated as citizens who have equal rights and equal access to the state. A key factor here is scale, while political organizations remain small there is limited need for impersonal systems of organization. When they become large there becomes a greater need. The history of the evolution of our sociopolitical organizations has been one involving the development of ever larger and more complex systems of organization as we have gone from small tribes to large empires and nation states to today's global institutions. In this way we go from the many thousands of small local cultures and political units to some form of single global sociopolitical organization, in that process differences between groups are required to be combined into larger political organizations, such as the nation state or multinational institutions. But the key question is though how does the combined organization work and represent its constituent member organizations? This is of course particularly relevant in an era of globalization where we are going through a process of integrating many different cultures and societies around the world. For much of human history people avoided developing into large organizations by splitting into new subgroups. The privilege of having a big world with a few people on it was our capacity to simply subdivide and separate into new fractions so as to avoid the complexities of large systems of political organization. In this regard anthropologist Napoleon Chagron has observed that population growth among the Yanomamo Indians of the Amazon basin led to villages splitting and spreading deeper into the tropical forests surrounding them. Due to such splitting the average village size of around 100 members remained fairly stable throughout time. At any given time though the more centrally located villages were the largest. Chagron suggested this was because being surrounded by other villages that were often hostile meant that central villages were less able than periphery ones to resolve internal conflicts by splitting off. For much of history formal political structures like the nation state were somewhat impractical as people could simply walk away when they did not like the rules or had some other objection and simply start a new community. In small communities of less than 100 people kinship ties were suffice for maintaining political organization. In these early communities the political system is based on the specificities of the group or some subset of the group. For example the males of a certain ancestry have traditionally been the sources of political authority within many small societies. However these kinship based ties for political organization only work on a local level within relatively small groups because they are subjective in nature. They are dependent upon the specificities of a certain group and thus do not generalize into objective rules that can apply to large impersonal organizations and be able to incorporate their many different cultures within a single objective system. Once one tribe encounters another the specificities that were used as the basis of order and organization within that society whether it was their specific religion, their specific family ties or specific geographical context they become no longer a universal principle of organization in the face of another sociopolitical system with another system of beliefs, social and political structures. These subjective rulesets for political organization are only relevant within the specific context within which they were formulated. Specificities cannot be generalized without creating contradictions when different groups with subjective specific rules of political organization come into contact and are required to form some combined organization. They either have to synthesize their specific rules into a more general rule set that applies to all or each side can try to retain their subjective pattern of organization and impose it on the other side thus trying to make their specific rule set a general principle governing the combined organization. Once a society contains many subcultures and groups either one section comes to rule above others or it is required to develop more abstract rules and principles for its governance that incorporate the various subcultures. When two groups with specific rule sets interact wishing to impose their pattern of organization on the other then the result is conflict of some kind. Throughout history the evolution of larger systems of political organization has been associated with conquest, the classical example being the evolution of large empires like that of the Incas, the Roman Empire or the Qin dynasty in China. In such a process of pattern formation political organizations come into contact exert a force against the other and that which exerts a greater force comes to rule over the other. This process is elaborated upon in Friedrich Hegel's most influential book The Phenomenology of Spirit where he writes that when two agents encounter each other and believe themselves to be free and unconstrained there comes to form a struggle for recognition as both actors cannot be unconstrained in this newly combined organization. This struggle develops into what Hegel calls the master slave dialectic. Both struggle for power over the other as they both try to maintain their status as free and unconstrained agents by projecting their subjective rules onto the objective rule set of the combined organization thus limiting the participation of the other's influence in the formation of these rules through some form of force or manipulation within a struggle. He writes that this struggle could go on forever but at some point one side comes to fear its annihilation by the other and submits to their will. The political system then enters into a more stable state with a master slave dynamic forming between the two different subgroups. However, this is not the end of the story of sociopolitical evolution for Hegel because this system has inherent contradictions. It is inherently unstable and that instability will drive it to develop further. The dominant group within society becomes dependent upon the subordinate group to maintain their status. For example, a mature group of males in society would be dependent upon maintaining a subordinate female group. The elite western columnulus were dependent upon the indigenous people for their privileges. The economically elite of today are dependent upon the economically deprived etc. The ruling elite are free in their capacity to extract resources from the subordinates but they are enslaved by being dependent upon them, while the slaves are prisoners in that they are being ruled by the elite, they are in their work not dependent upon them in the same way as the rulers are dependent upon them. This original theory of Hegel's got extended by Karl Marx and eventually evolved into the complex theory of social systems, a theory that sociopolitical systems are inherently driven and even defined by their dynamic between the rulers and the rules whose contradictions eventually lead to revolutionary change. Such systems of organization are always centralized in hierarchy as they are designed to control the transfer of some resource from the larger social system to some subset of members. The development of ever larger political systems of organization given this dynamic thus leads to greater centralization around a single group. Typically to maintain order the ruling elite are required to present an image to the people that they in fact represent them and are acting purely in the interests of the society at large. And in fact they are acting to achieve certain ends pertaining to the interests of their subgroup. In Hegel's and Marx's theory of conflict the contradictions in the system eventually lead to its downfall through revolution. Marx's theory of this process was utopian in that it posited that the slaves would then after the revolution rule themselves. In reality though the opposite is more often the case, the previous elite is overthrown but the law of the centralized political structures is too seducive for the revolutionary avant-garde. The leaders of the revolution over time themselves become the new elite defining their own subset of rules as the new set of objective rules, a dynamic that George Orwelld expounded upon in his book Animal Farm. This has been the dynamic surrounding the formation of many nations around the world, from Lenin's revolution in Russia to General Gaddafi's revolution in Libya to the history of Robert Maghabian Zimbabwe to China's State Communism. Likewise it is largely the dynamic defining the process of decolonialization around the world from Myanmar to the Middle East to Africa and Latin America. As the colonial powers withdrew the underlining traditional divides remains and without the social infrastructure to form consensus-based institutions specific groups came to constitute the new ruling elite. The complex theory of political dynamics sees the evolution of political systems as one of polarization due to inherent contradictions. The ruling classes become more centralized and the oppressed parties become more excluded. Likewise, those of merit cannot rise from the excluded party to the dominant party which works to reduce the ruling classes' merit over time while retaining these members of merit within this subgroup. Such dynamics of conflict reduce the system's development in that the ruling regime is typically extractive in some fashion. Significant amounts of resources are consumed in maintaining the structures of control required for its maintenance while the excluded party is prevented from forming political and often social organizations. The classical example of this dynamic being the Western colonialists such as the British in Indian Africa. The political system was based on race excluding those of non-Caucasian backgrounds. The regime was explicitly extractive and by the beginning of the 1800s at the height of its rule in India, the British East Indian Company had to maintain a private army of over 260,000 people. Likewise the British left most of their colonies politically fragile and unstable when they eventually withdrew. In this whole process of interaction between different subgroups, even though the contradictions may remain, a new level of organization is formed and often people see that it is no longer possible to go back to the old separate communities. Internal contradictions are what render systems unsustainable over time. The contradictions of projecting subjective rules as patterns for an objective political organization are what render sociopolitical systems unsustainable. As long as they remain, the system remains unstable with the potential for sudden regime shift. The system stays going around in a cyclical process until objective rules can be developed that are inclusive for the different members of the combined organization, thus giving it a broader base of representation and making it more stable. Of course this interaction between different systems of political organization and the evolution of new levels of coordination does not necessarily need to be conflictual in nature when different sociocultural organizations encounter each other and are required to form overarching structures of coordination. This can also be based upon deliberative processes, the application of reason to understanding the different patterns, identifying the abstract rules and principles that are common to each independent of their specificities and the formation of governing rules based on those general principles that include the essential characteristics of the different members. Instead of forming political structures out of a hierarchy of dominance with one subjective organization prevailing over the other, the central principle of deliberative governance is that of searching for commonalities through a process of reason in order to overcome the subjective perspectives of each group and thus find something that is objective to all as the basis for governance. This process involves the use of conceptual abstraction. Abstraction is the process of removing successive layers of detail from some set of entities to identify those factors that are common to all in the way that an artist paints an abstract painting not to capture the details of the subject matter but to express something more fundamental in general. In a sociopolitical context, abstraction means searching for those factors that are common to all the people and cultures involved and basing the legal system on those. Of course, there will be disagreements in what those rules should be and that is why it requires some impersonal process to achieve this. Members use reason to search for what may be universal principles of social organization and from that some objective basis for the presentation of their opinions. Objective reasons are given in a process of discovery to identify which factors are most relevant to all and which factors are subjective and only relevant within specific personal context. Thus we can see how successfully evolving new levels of abstraction in political organization in turn requires new levels of depth in our understanding of social systems in order to distinguish between what is objective and subjective and the development of institutions based on what is determined objective for all the members of the community. One of the foremost thinkers of political multiculturalism is Biku Karek who elaborates the theory of this kind in his book Rethinking Multiculturalism, Cultural Diversity and Political Theory. The core of the book addresses the important theoretical questions raised by contemporary multicultural society, positing that as societies come into contact in the process of political evolution the critical factor is whether they are open to change. If a culture and society posits that it already has the correct answer, that things do not change and that there is nothing new for the culture to learn through that cultural interaction then this is clearly a recipe for conflictual relations. Parek identifies a number of standard approaches to this interaction but comes to the conclusion that they typically function to leave the dominant culture unaltered. He argues what is required to achieve a successful multicultural model is the openness of the major culture to transformation. In such an eventuality he sees the state as becoming a community of communities with overlapping spheres that constitute the public and the civic. Where members have to adopt and find common grounds. Citizenship is understood as differentiated, meaning that different groups come to have different ties to the state. Parek calls for continual intercultural dialogue and negotiation. He writes that social integration is to be grounded in a multi-culturally constituted public realm which both sustains and in turn is sustained by a multi-culturally constituted private realm. The subjective realm of each community is required for them to continue to develop their specific culture in historical narrative and to formulate their own identity within the broader community. As such subjective beliefs may prevail within the private domains but in order to implement a rule as being objective it must arrive from reasons given that in turn relate to something fundamental about the human condition and thus to all of the people involved. In such a way the formation of ever larger successful sociopolitical organizations requires in turn a never deeper understanding of the human condition to decipher what is truly objective about that condition versus what may be specific to individual instances of it. Today many political systems around the world call themselves democracies and have all of the formal political institutions of such an organization but many of them remain deeply concentrated around specific subclasses based on ethnicity wealth or family. In this respect the measurement of a political system is in the degree of abstraction in its rules and the resulting capacity to integrate different members of society. In an age of globalization the difference between an unstable and stable political system is in its capacity to integrate the different groups so that all have representation and feel included in the system. This is of course not just a discourse on historical events or an academic debate but clearly of central importance in this age of globalization just as the technology of agriculture enabled us to build the first states and empires and industrial technology enabled us to form the modern nation-state. Today with information technology we're forming some kind of global sociopolitical organization and this same dynamic is playing out again in the formation of that global organization. The global sphere will not remain in the unregulated semi-chaotic state that it is today for long as power moves to the global level and people increasingly recognize this they will desire that it becomes regulated in some way although that regulation can take many different forms. Global interconnectivity and interdependence are clearly where our economies societies and political systems of organization are developing Information technology is clearly the tool for the formation of these global institutions. This technology of information is exceedingly powerful both in its capacity for mass control and for mass collaboration. Political conflict in the formation of this global organization is already shifting to information technology increasingly nations and people that wish to project their influence over others in this interconnected world do it through online propaganda, hacking, information wars and cyber wars. The question remains open though will the internet be an open platform for discourse in finding common grounds and implementing that through a new set of institutions based on these information networks or will it be a system of mass surveillance and control on a scale that we've never seen before. One thing is for sure though just as with the development of the institutional structures of the nation state during the industrial age in building out this institutional infrastructure of the network society there will be many surprises and lessons to learn along the way.