Modeling social conflict: Theory, data and integration across multiple levels

U.S. engagement around the world involving ethnic conflict, genocide and other humanitarian challenges raises a number of key challenges for military and civilian planners. Social crises are riddled with highly complex micro-and macro-level interactions. The Ethnic conflict, Repression, Insurgency, and Social strife (ERlS) system is a multi-paradigm model of ethnic conflict at multiple levels of analysis and implementation. ERIS aims to model the complexity of micro-and macro-level interactions within a society and provide insight into the range of possible social outcomes given varying sets of initial conditions. Social science theories such as relative deprivation, social capital and electoral incentives, among others, inform the system design. So that the project can scale, generalize and apply to a variety of contexts, it is built upon flexible theoretical drivers that draw together methods and ideas from empirical social science and computer science.