As has also been recently acknowledged in several speeches of important political and economical representatives, rising levels of economic inequality represent a major moral and political issue of our time. Yet, statistical physics can provide methods and tools which are both innovative and helpful towards a deeper comprehension of the mechanisms underlying the emergence of this and similar collective phenomena. Thanks to its very nature and to the exploratory character of his models, statistical physics can, in a continuous dialogue with economics, political economics and related disciplines, contribute to the identification of actions towards inequality reduction and to the study and treatment of related questions as well.

Recent events in volatile geo-political regions underscore the need to develop models and theories predicting emergent properties of social systems associated with socio-political instabilities and tipping points. Statistical physics applied to social networks have seen a burst of new activity in the last few years addressing some of these issues. In particular, the properties of nonequilibrium opinion dynamics on a range of ideal and real networks such as the time scales to consensus as a function of underlying topology and local interactions have been extensively reported. Human behavior, the spreading of population-level trends, and the evolution of cultural norms are profoundly affected by the influenceability of individuals and the social networks that link them together. The roles and optimal placement of committed agents with fixed opinions which model individuals and institutions such as mavens and extreme fundamentalists have been of central focus in view of their relevance to recent social upheavals. This session will discuss latest results on the above signficant topics from a statistical and dynamical approach.