In this article, a simple simulation model of domestic armed conflict will be introduced with its empirical application. While many theoretical approaches to the domestic conflicts have seen them within a context of some relationship between given social and/or cultural groups, usually derived according to some common trait (e. g. ethnicity, religion, class), this model does not start from such aggregate analytical units. Rather, it tries to theorize the conflicts with an emphasis on the accompanying process, a process in which many inhabitants are politically mobilized and then divided. For this purpose, the spatial multi-agent simulation technique and its methodological characteristics are fully utilized.
In essence, the model is a kind of stochastic process involving many agents, but the underlying idea and the guiding logics are quite clear. It constructs an “artificial state”, consisting of territory, inhabitants, and government, in computer, and then stochastically “stages” rebellions there. The inhabitants are spatially distributed over the territory and differentiated from each other according to several social/cultural traits. The government and the insurgent organizations, while fighting each other, mobilize the necessary supports and resources from the inhabitants by manipulating “symbols”, which specify for what kind of inhabitants the state shall be constituted.
Following an overview of this model, its application to the civil war in the Sudan since 1983 will be reported. Using simplified ethno-linguistic and religious distribution maps of the Sudan as a crude approximation of the country, simulations were run in this “artificial Sudan”. The purpose here is understanding, and, as for the Sudanese civil war, this means constructing logics elucidating and connecting its following two aspects with the aid of the model: (1) the prolonged division of territorial rule between the northern-based government and the southern-based insurgent organization, the SPLA, and (2) the political aspect of this division, namely the competition between the ethnically and religiously exclusive government and the ethnically and religiously inclusive insurgents.
The simulation results and their analysis suggest that the two aspects are indeed inseparable. One of the important implications is that both of the inclusive and the exclusive symbols upheld by the two antagonists have some “fitness” (i. e. difficult to uproot) in their respective localities, leading to the political, as well as military, deadlock in the country.
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