Simulation in the Service of Society

Abstract

An emerging use for simulation is its employment to help people better understand how war comes about. This improved understanding can help people devise better ways to prevent wars from occurring. Consid erably more research needs to be done to make a simu lation that adequately represents the dynamics that lead to a war, however. One aspect of this work is that we need to distinguish between different types of vio lent conflict. We need this distinction because the pro cesses by which an ethnic conflict erupts differ in many significant ways from the processes that lead to a war between two countries, and those different processes require unique representations within a simulation model. This paper presents findings about war from a project to accomplish that specific task. It is a project to categorize conflicts into different types based on their shared and differing characteristics. The findings about the nature and characteristics of war are based on a dataset of 2,563 violent conflicts since 1400 AD, information that has not been assembled at such a scale until now.