UNDERSTANDING INSURGENCY BY USING AGENT-BASED COMPUTATIONAL EXPERIMENTATION: CASE STUDY OF INDONESIA

Intra-state conflict is becoming an endemic feature of the post-Cold-War era, increasingly challenging international stability and security. Specifically, protracted violent conflict in the form of insurgency is being predicted as the most likely form of future warfare. This highlights the necessity of understanding the conditions under which tensions emerge within a state and converge toward violent conflict. In this paper, we use agent-based modeling as an integrative tool to understand the conditions that favor the emergence, duration, and intensity of insurgency. We present a Virtual International System developed in the Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulation (SEAS-VIS) to analyze insurgency in a strife-torn region of the world. SEAS-VIS provides an environment in which to conduct computational experimentation as a way to begin to understand the largely qualitative aspects of insurgency. The theoretical models used in building SEAS-VIS agents are calibrated from open-source data and validated against published real-world incidents. We then use the validated SEAS-VIS to analyze dynamic interrelationships among grievances, level of resources, and organizational capacity to mobilize members toward social action.