A Model of Long-Term Conflict Resolution and Cooperation

Abstract

The formal end of a political conflict does not always create lasting peace, as interpersonal violence can persist for years or decades after large-scale hostility ends. A key question for policymakers and peace builders, then, is how interventions into situations of low social capital might resolve persistent interpersonal conflicts sustained through complex networks of interaction. Existing approaches to this question generally focus on the small-scale effects of interventions like peace education that seek to change the attitudes of a few individuals at a time. Less focus has been paid to how such programs could leverage social networks to have broader effects on society as a whole. This paper explores this scale effect by building a conceptual agent-based model of conflict resolution and cooperation to examine when new ideas introduced by peace builders might spread throughout a population. We find significant benefits to layering different kinds of programs on the same populations, with the goal of leveraging the structure of society to maximize intervention impact.