Structural Strain, Trust Erosion, and System Response: A Coordination-Based Framework for Protest and Conflict

This paper presents a coordination-based framework for understanding structural strain, trust erosion, and system-level responses across both domestic and international domains. Rather than treating protest and conflict as isolated events, the study conceptualizes them as structural outcomes of coordination breakdown under accumulated strain. The framework links cross-domain misalignment—particularly across housing, labor, and demographic systems—to the gradual redistribution of risk toward individuals, resulting in declining trust and increasing coordination costs. Under such conditions, instability may emerge internally as protest or externally as conflict, representing different expressions of the same underlying mechanism. These dynamics may further extend to the global level, contributing to reduced cooperation capacity, institutional erosion, and self-reinforcing feedback loops of instability. To illustrate the operationalization of the framework, a simplified computational model is provided. The model estimates structural risk and trust as functions of key socio-economic variables and institutional buffering capacity. A reference implementation is available in an open repository. This work is conceptual and does not aim to provide empirical causal identification. Instead, it offers an analytical structure for interpreting systemic instability and a foundation for future empirical and computational research.