ontological reflections on peace and war · relations and peace research literature on war and...
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Ontological Reflections onPeace and WarHayward R. Alker
SFI WORKING PAPER: 1999-02-011
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SANTA FE INSTITUTE
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January 31, 1999
O NT O LO G ICAL REF LECTIO NS O N PEACE AND W AR1
by
Hayward R. Alker*
Responding to a provocative question by Hiroharu Seki about Hiroshimaontologies, the author reviews his own thinking about the ontological primitivesappropriate for peace-research relevant event-data making and defense-relevant high-performance knowledge bases. He proposes that second generation adaptive, multi-agent models in the tradition of Santa Fe Institute be developed to include the sociallyshared memories, including their identity-redefining traumas, of nations and ofinternational society, as well as their relational/migrational/ecological histories ofcommunity building success and failure. Historicity in this ontologically distinctivesense is also a challenge for the relevant computationally oriented internationalrelations and peace research literature on war and peace.
When asked to contribute to a volume honoring Hiroharu Seki, whom I knew and have
admired for several decades, I was not sure what would be an appropriate appreciation of his
significant, wide-ranging career. The theme of defense and peace-research relevant ontology finally
crystalized in my mind followed hearing him speak from the audience at a recent International
Studies Association meeting. Politely, but insistently, he asked a distinguished panel of scholars (I
paraphrase): how can you put Hiroshima ontology into your approach to international relations? At
a panel where epistemological and ontological pluralism was a central issue, and an inter-
* John A. McCone Professor of International Relations University of Southern California
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disciplinary professional group where social constructivism is a hot topic2, his remark was both
highly appropriate and particularly challenging.
Seki’s difficult but powerful insistence deserves sustained reflection. I see his injunction as
closely related to the development of a collective sense of history as a basis for international society
or its successor having the capacity to direct itself towards a better future, and away from horrifying
pasts, towards a world where Hiroshimas, Auschwitzs and Chernobyls never reoccur. In other
words, Seki appears to be trying to discover how can a powerful sense of history and tradition, of
prohibitions and morally preferable possibilities, be developed, shared and deeply transmitted
to future generations – at the level of their culturally transmitted, ontological and
phenomenological ways of seeing and encoding reality, as well as its more consciously reflected
upon norms and practices -- so that such horrors are not likely to reoccur.
To pay homage to Professor Seki, I have decided to make more widely and publicly available
some earlier, perhaps less than judiciously expressed thoughts along similar lines. First, I shall recall
briefly the international relations simulation world of the 1960s which Hiroharu Seki and I both
inhabited, and where we first met through the courtesy of Harold Guetzkow. Then, I shall reflect
further on the absence of morally powerful lessons in the way behavioral scientists have represented
specific, singular international events like Hiroshima or Auschwitz. Where, for example, in formally
modeled accounts of international relations, are the triggers for the ironical historical sensitivity
characteristic of many modern and some post-modern thinkers?3 Do not simple one or two
dimensional quantifications of horrifying international events like these obfuscate, or tend to erase
from our consciousness, the complicated socio-historical networks normally binding together a
national or international society’s members but being torn apart by such events-acts?
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Following the practice of contemporary computer scientists in treating “ontologies” as
humanly respecifiable linguistic primitives used in the design and implementation of artificial
knowledge representation and retrieval systems4, I shall suggest “event data” coding practices5 for
greatly reducing the inadvertent complicity with such horrible events which their reality-butchering,
“naturalizing” scientific codifications/quantifications as “event data” tend to suggest. Next,
attempting to help fulfill Professor Seki’s belief in the promise of international simulations, I reflect
on my several visits to the Santa Fe Institute. I show how a better sense of historical connectivities,
or of trauma-avoiding historicity, might inform a recent ecological research program on adaptive,
multi-agent systems attempting to incorporate international issues. Finally, I speculate about the
future of international crisis research, inspired by the recent computationally-oriented writings of
Gavan Duffy, Brian Cantwell Smith and Thomas Schmalberger.
I. Puttin g W ar and Pe ace M o re Ful ly int o O ur M odels ’ O nto logica l Poss ibilit ies
In the late 1960s—when Professor Seki and I were both associated with Harold Guetzkow’s
Simulated International Processes project—I made my first investigation of ontological possibilities
in more or less computerized international simulations.6 In what then I might have referred to as a
study of the “face validity” of different simulated worlds, my investigative strategy was
comparatively to attempt to represent the consequences of an accidental, rather than an intentional,
nuclear explosion in three different simulated worlds.7
But even a hypothetical, gamed exploration of the implications of a Cold War accident at a
clandestine Soviet test site in Polunochnoe, proved beyond the capacities of skilled modelers at that
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time: Professor Lincoln Bloomfield’s non-computerized Political Military Exercise evidenced much
more realistically suggestive possibilities for escalation and conflict containment than the formalized
or partly formalized models Ronald Brunner and I investigated, but the gamed results of his
imaginative scenario were especially difficult to replicate scientifically. Guetzkow’s own Inter-
Nation Simulation, which combined human role players with computational decision environments,
abstracted too much of the particulars of international history when it treated nations as abstract
entities named “Bingo,” “Erga,” etc. And the major fully computerized simulation at the U.S.
Department of Defense’s Joint War Games Agency in the late 1960s, TEMPER, couldn’t represent
“unintentional actions” well; it also regionalized international threats very implausibly. European
NATO members sent troop reinforcements to the continental United States in the middle of the
TEMPER-simulated Polunochnoya crisis! Seki’s ontological challenge was already a relevant issue,
although the developers of TEMPER thought historically in categories linked most directly to the
Cold War rather than to the costs of victory and defeat in World War II. A look at event data
research in subsequent decades will reveal persistent versions of related representational
conundrums.
II. How Not to O blite rat e I dent it y-Rede fining Traum as in Event - Data Coding
Pra ct ices 8
In terms of intellectual growth, my most important peace research paper was “Can the End of
Power Politics be Part of the Concepts with which Its [Power Politics’] Story is Told?” As
methodologically restated in “Emancipatory Empiricism: Toward the renewal of empirical peace
research,”9 yesterday’s computational tools and data-making practices rarely have the avoidance of
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specific major international traumas (which actually occurred much earlier and might recur today or
in the future) as their central, codifiable reality. Our “realistic” scientific procedures have long been
in danger of being captured by the often ugly, frequently recurring but probably not eternal realities
of “Power Politics” that we as scholars of the successes and failures of the Westphalian state system
must try faithfully to represent, as well as to transcend.
Whether beauty or ugliness is our subject, the naturalistic search for quantified scientific
replicability can butcher specifically situated traumas or ecstacies. We must learn from
Wordsworth’s famous poem, “The Thorn”:
Our meddling intellectMisshapes the beauteous forms of things.We murder to dissect.Enough of science and of art.Close up these barren leaves.Come forth and bring with youA heart that watches and receives.
What are the “events” that the event data specialist tries replicably, and hopefully
quantitatively, to encode? Webster’s Third New International Dictionary illustrates it’s first
definition of “event” as “something that happens” by citing Wordsworth – “this day’s event has
laid on me the duty of opening my heart”; compare the above indictment of science (and art)
unreflective about the influences of its originating experiences.
Two themes derive from these reflections on the ways in which we fail scientifically to
encode the partly shared, socio-historical significances of Hiroshima, Auschwitz, and other
traumatic events shaping the internal and relational identities and international “destinies” of
particular nations or peoples. First, I will briefly discuss the “high politics” of disciplinary birth,
renewal, death and transfiguration. In this domain paradigmatic, disciplinary, and inter-
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disciplinary wars have sometimes been directed more or less consciously against humanistic
history, radical political economy, transnational/international sociology, peace research, the
cultural self-understandings of conquered nations, and even the social reality of “power
politics.” The second theme concerns the ways International Relations specialists operationally
address “event data.” It concerns how they might better include both socio-cultural and political-
economic historicities, including the recognition of distortive effects of their own disciplinary
historicity, in their work..
This new, merged research direction, now significantly, but never completely,
operationalizable with contemporary “conversational computing” procedures, should help slow
or reverse our disciplinary descent from analytical “accident” to “malfeasance” to “homicide” to
“genocide”. By “historical/disciplinary genocide,” I mean the premeditated, voluntaristic,
“analytical murder” of socio-historically shared achievements and failures, including the
replicable traumas and the people-defining, semi-historical “hero stories” of societal
collectivities and transnational disciplines. The culprits? The nonexclusive focus of the present
account: solipsistic, individualistic, one-sided, asocial, overly quantitative, phenomenologically
insensitive and ontologically impoverished story-telling and data-making perspectives and
procedures.
T he h i s t or i c i t y o f i nt e r n at i o na l e v e n t s a nd sc ho l ar sh i p
According to Webster, then, events are things that happen, activities or experiences,
noteworthy occurrences or happenings; they are thus pieces of history. International events are then
events that are international in some respect, pieces of international history noteworthy from perhaps
several domestic or international perspectives (usually those of journalists). International event data
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are replicable codifications of these pieces of historical experience, generated from particular
International Relations scholarly vantage points.
But, we must ask, what are the boundaries of an event, what are the connections (at any
instant, and through time), and how do they affect the kind of event it is, or that we, or others,
describe it to be? How can we better delineate the ways events contain, overlap, inter-relate, inter-
penetrate, fold back upon, cumulate, or subsume each other?10
Some refer to the Pelopponesian War as an event; similarly others refer to World War I or II
separately, the latter being argued to have started in 1931 (Manchuria), 1935 (Ethiopia), 1939
(Poland) or 1941 (Pearl Harbor). But classical historians recognize that, just as world systems
theorists are having us rethink the ultimate separability of the First and Second World Wars of this
century, Thucydides was both insightful and correct, by a long, but uneasy peace into a single war.
The meaning and significance of the later events in both wars – in particular, as attempts to fulfill,
redefine or overturn earlier policies or settlements, i.e. positively or negatively judged
precedents – is so colored by the earlier period of fighting that it is appropriate to say the earlier
events are contained in , constitutive of the later ones, that together these episodes constitute a single
event, a larger unity. Here is a conception of historicity that further and more deeply explicates
Seki’s difficult conception of “Hiroshima ontology.”
Which perspectives concerning an event – at least including significant contemporary
participants – do not belong in its adequate codification? Behavioral codings by Middle American
graduate students debatably assume (and allow limited statistical tests for) conceptual universalism.
But the diversity, multiplicity and richness of multiple perspectives concerning war boundaries is
already powerfully suggested, inter alia, by the continentally distinct initial dates for World War II
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given above. As recent American history, and the diplomatic Bluebooks of World War I fame make
clear, sharply different versions of events, from different individual, organizational, national or
transnational perspectives, are intriguingly, but differentially constitutive of their noteworthiness.
Overlapping, changing, as well as opposed, regionalisms11 seem a better empirical starting point for
the boundaries, parties and issues making up some of the more complex wars of the present (and
other) centuries. We need critically and constructively to rethink the bases for excluding from
critical, comparative, scientific analyses ab initio certain nationalities, traditions or paradigms of
research in our struggling, not-so-mature interdiscipline of International Relations.
Part of the historical significance or noteworthiness of international events arises
from the larger events, processes, histories or which they are seen to be part. If participants give
significance to the events of their times in terms of larger (but debatable) historical constructs –
Thucydides’ account of Athens’ imperial rise and tragic fall, Aristophanes’ proto-feminist
indictments of the destructiveness of male Athenian economic greed. Soviet versions of the triumph
of Socialism are now obviously bad history compared to those consistent with the current rise of
global capitalism. But at what point, and why, should such internal, identity-constitutive
connections to larger, debatable historical happenings be ignored? In our scientific codifications of
significance, we must remember that distances and historical projects are measured differently, with
different degrees of universality and timelessness.
From a multi-disciplinary perspective, is not the genre of classical authors’ writings
indicative of a multi-faceted approach to truths of various sorts? Aristophones’ entered his plays
into the Athenian competition, presumably describing them as “comic fictions”; but they serve as
evidence for feminists and Marxists of economic and gender differences neglected by “Realist”
analyses. And although Thucydides’ scientific “history” obviously can be distinguished from
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crowd-pleasing morality plays, that doesn’t destroy Raymond Aron’s claim that Thucydides wrote
art and science simultaneously , or the Classical reading of this history as a tragic morality play about
the arrogance of power.12
. What “unbiased science” can legitimately discard the evidence presented by any of these
perspectives? Ironic criticism has been a mainstay of progressive, critical, modern thought. Must
we try to denude our language of its morally based critical power? Logical positivism tried to do so,
but failed. Shouldn’t a deeper appreciation of how language works be a better guide?
The particular kind of event connectivity that most concerns us here was referred to above
with terms like “socio-historical,” “historical sociality,” or the “historicity” of international events.
Among philosophers of social science and historians, “historicity” has been a concept developed to
delineate both a very precious, distinctive and central feature of human sociocultural evolution
and of a set of humanistic disciplines (history, rhetoric and dialectic, etc.) substantively and
methodologically distinctive from the natural sciences.
Admitting that further historical investigation of this argument is required, I suggest
tentatively that the relative lack of attention to the conceptual and representational issues raised by
this focus has several roots. It is linked both to the “logical positivist” or “behavioral scientific”
origins of early events data research methodologies, to a resistant unfamiliarity of most International
Relations researchers with these professional-identity-challenging issues, and/or to their lack of
expert awareness of operationally relevant, but demanding, alternative representational approaches.
More will be said below about the paradoxical possibility that more technically sophisticated
representational/codification practices – those described within a paradigm of “conversational
computing”13 -- can give us more humanistically defensible empirical research practices.
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The historicity of events takes place through what phenomenologists refer to as the
intentional (in the double senses of “object-constituting” and purposive), the extensional (referential)
and the intentional (meaning constitutive) dimensions of meaning, and the interpretive ways groups
of citizens and scholars recognize and define the events’ existence. It takes place, one might say
metaphorically, when a social group’s “past” is born, i.e. it becomes accessible to them in a
temporal, but necessarily clock-like, fashion. Following Olafson, more precisely14 one can define
“historicity” as the socially shared self-temporalization of their collective experiences among
members of a continuous human society of some kind. Harold Lasswell, for example, clearly
called for the empirical tracking of the generative elements in such historicities when he said:
For better or worse we are embedded in historical configurations which are characterized by
the existence of a large number of comprehensive symbols in the name of which people kill
or die.15
As important for us, professionally, would be a second class of nationally and transnationally
shaped historicities: those of disciplinary societies of International Relations scholars, including the
overlapping professional groupings of historians and peace researchers. Among such “inter-
disciplines,” key symbol configurations, research-orienting concepts and their changing
interpretations are central embodiments of professional “historicities.”
The connections of socio-political and disciplinary historicities are complicated. Indeed,
widely but incompletely shared concepts, paradigms of theory and practice, and specialized symbols
and languages reflect and help constitute national, transnational and international self-identifications,
understood both historically and in disciplinary ways. To cite a Communitarian, a Realist and a
Radical/Marxist theorist, recall the notion of historicity implicit in Karl Deutsch’s theory of
pluralistic security communities, Hedley Bull’s historical accounts of the expansion of the
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“anarchical society” around the globe, or Lenin’s ideas about the revolutionary historicity of national
Communist parties and Socialist Internationals in the age of imperialism.
When it is not practically or technically necessary to do so, to ignore the collaborative and/or
antagonistic historicities just referred to is definitionally or methodologically to bias, to distort,
multiple meanings imbedded within international historical reality. To codify or measure such
events in a correspondingly partial, unconnected fashion is to sever, cut off, dismember or even
“quantitatively butcher” essentially qualitative histories in the good name of science. It is to destroy
the transnational and international historicities out of which international political community and
world order must grow.
O pe ra t i o na l i z i n g hi s t o ri c i t y i n e v e n t d at a r e s e a r c h
Event data research attempts to apply scientifically justifiable and replicable procedures to
the categorical or quantitative measurement of relevant newspaper accounts. It is a response, so far
of limited but still urgent practical utility, to the need to address the great majority of historical
materials which are themselves qualitative in nature.16 Having spent twenty years researching the
issues of humanistic interpretation and explanation of the practice and transcendence of “Power
Politics,” I believe that we need to develop much farther qualitative ways of modeling collective
human intentions, interpretations, and differentially shared precedential memories beyond those
reviewed in my Rediscoveries and Reformulations.
A practical variant of Seki’s ontological question still remains: How can international event
data researchers be more deeply sensitive to the economic, cultural and political historicities in terms
of which social groups give meaning to their collective experiences, in the name of which their
typical members are willing to kill, to die, or to be killed? The regulative ideal I suggest for such
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work is: develop computerized representations of socially significant events that
simultaneously contain or reference most or all of their external and internal (identity-
constituting) relations, their inter- and inner-connections, and the cooperative and conflictful
historicities giving them social and scholarly significance.
What are these relationships? Where can they be found? I have argued: look at the
constitutive conversations, the scholarly debates, the meaningful interactions, the social discourses
and even the “negotiated silences” where the events become, remain, cease to be socially, culturally,
economically or politically significant, either historically or scientifically.
Because of the way it emphasizes historic interconnections, and includes the history of its
generation, utilization and transformation, the relevant data set would look like a well organized, and
transparent human memory. Additional research might try to fill in missing intentions, search for
more holistic historical patterns, paralleling the ways that our own passionate or relatively detached
intellects dissect and rewrite the past.
The very large role of natural language representations (which include and can generate
quantifications where appropriate) is itself noteworthy. Data analyses according to different
paradigmatic codifications and more richly comparable than mere numbers. Historical narratives
written from different participant or scholarly perspectives provide levels of information and
modalities of interpretive coherence not naturally representable as regression equations or statistical
correlations. When episode histories and codebooks can be treated as applicable precedents or case-
redefining procedures, conversationally reflective modes of case- or explanation-based reasoning17
and data analysis can more fully parallel the unsilenced conversational practices of emancipatory
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dialogical relations. The linking of freedom, critical rationality and the responsible pursuit of larger
human goals goes back at least to Thucydides’ history.
This idealized sketch shows several ways in which the historical context of particular events
can be treated as part of that event, without the data analyst becoming, as Harold Guetzkow might
say, “data bound.” Histories of event citations in precedential scholar/practitioner texts or speeches
would augment existing data sets. Evidence on the various ways in which practical historians or
scholars construct their pasts would also grow. Evidence on multiple historical and scholarly
temporalizations would allow empirically grounded, constructive characterizations of the shared
historicity of social events and social scientific practice. Thus the sociality of shared, opposed, or
coordinated perspectives and practices would be social facts within the data set, rather than
statistically problematical realities.
Starting with work at MIT, and continuing at MIT and Syracuse, Gavan Duffy and John
Mallery have developed a RELATUS text analysis computer system for computationally parsing,
storing or retrieving, and analyzing different narrative accounts; they hope to extend these
procedures to hermeneutic, conversational and historical contexts of application,18 which can be
organized in terms of different theoretical or socio-historical perspectives. Measurements
corresponding to codebook definitions or revisions can be reconstituted into the descriptive
sentences from which they were initially derived. Replicable, nonquantitative representations for
catching elements of the past in the present are beginning to appear. Historicity, potentially, exists
within a symbiotic network of human experts and their recursively structured computer programs.
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III . Inco rporat ing Po litica l Hist ori es in Ada ptive, M ulti -Agent Ecolo gical M odels
I have extended Seki’s concern with the phenomenological and ontological dimensions of a
deep commitment to the avoidance of nuclear war destruction like Hiroshima to include genocides
like that exemplified by Auschwitz. And I have argued that such concerns can be treated as specific
historicities. Can this way of thinking be scientifically extended to include the avoidance of
ecological devastation? Can such precedential historicities be included at the
foundational/ontological level in other research programs than those International Relations has
normally concerned itself with?
Coincident with the age’s concern with better understanding and promoting “sustainable
development,” I now want to discuss ecologically oriented models, and the need to put sharable
human histories, with their trauma-avoiding lessons, into them. As Professor Seki would want us to
do, I assert here, and try to exemplify, the continuing need for interdisciplinary peace researchers to
bridge gaps, to connect war and peace practices and possibilities, to the issues of contemporary
concern. As the previous pages should have made apparent, the ontological and representational
issues of putting shared human consciousness, memories and moral choices within ecological
models is not a trivial one.
The need to historicize ecological modeling practices in a peace-research-relevant way arose
in my mind at an exciting April 1994 workshop which I attended at the Santa Fe Institute in New
Mexico.19 There were at least three major thematic convergences, pregnant with further research
implications, evident to me by the end of (or shortly after) my participation in the Crude Look at the
Whole (CLAW) Workshop. Here is a brief sketch of them.
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L at e r al P r e s s ur e Th e or y M e e t s A d ap t i v e M u l t i - A ge n t M o de l i n g
The joint presentations of John Holland and Joshua Epstein were a wonderful kick-off for the
seminar. As I soon learned, these were mere introductions to a style of adaptive, multi-agent, grid-
based, ecologically inspired modeling that is a central thematic unity of the work at the Santa Fe
Institute (SFI).20 My background in elementary artificial life simulations and Holland’s genetic
algorithms meant that I was not totally surprised by either presentation, but the interdisciplinary
synthesis of elements of geography, biology, demography, economics and sociology in Epstein’s
stunningly effective visual presentation was very impressive. The spatialization of social processes
emergent from the interactions of autonomous, message passing agents recalled writings by
Schelling, Bremer and Mihalka, Cusack and Stoll, and Duffy21 on power political interactions on
territorial grids. Some of this literature was unfamiliar to SFI scholars. And, driven by the concern
for improving the peace relevance of the social ontologies used in inter-disciplinary futures oriented
work, I engaged with these authors.
It was my impression that the Epstein-Axtell model had much simpler, but more social
scientifically interesting bio-social foundations. But, I found Holland’s ECHO system (with its
evocations of Burks, Axelrod, Cohen and Holland—Michigan BACH) elegant and visually
suggestive, with a deeper grounding in evolutionary ecology.22 The coloring of different Prisoner’s
Dilemma players on a spatial grid gave very nice “cooperative” results of the emergent sort one has
come to expect from Santa Fe. Holland’s and Murray Gell-Mann’s23 emphasis on the minimally
complex “cartoon-like” character of such formalizations/ visualizations was entirely in the spirit of
what I took to be a heuristic exercise. Holland’s recognition of the modular character of genetic
selection processes within selection processes recalled as well the Leibnizian ontology (monads
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within monads...) informing the Rapoport/DT Campbell/Boulding/Simon hierarchies of
knowing/adapting processes I learned from the General Systems Yearbook many years ago.24
The initial convergence of Epstein’s artificial histories of life on the sugarscape with
Choucri-North lateral pressure accounts of the demographic-technological-resource-using growth,
intersection and conflict of nations was stunning. Nations in Conflict (with 44 years of empirically
based econometric models of processes leading up to World War I), Choucri and Meadows’ System
Dynamics models of resource scarcity and resulting violence, North’s War, Peace and Survival ,
Choucri-North-Yamakage on Japan25, the demographic-technological-territorial profiles in Global
Accord 26 (which correspond roughly to different population densities differently located on Epstein’s
sugarscapes) all fit Epstein-Axtell’s story extremely well. The best evidence of a closeness of fit
came when Robert North and Joshua Epstein started talking about a common problem: how to build
hierarchical social structures in their expansionary stories. A kind of class structure seemed to
appear on Epstein’s video screen, as in North’s empirically-grounded theorizing.
But there was a divergence, too, which I was puzzling about until I later heard Thomas
Homer-Dixon speak at MIT in a seminar on environmental stress, migration and violence. Homer-
Dixon has a chapter in Global Accord , a major research project underway, and considerable
notoriety from Robert D. Kaplan’s Atlantic Monthly piece on “The Coming Anarchy.”27 He passed
out two papers, one summarizing his project’s research findings, and the second discussing the
“ingenuity” necessary to avoid the violence-provoking ecological disasters in the making reported on
in that summary28. He is not the fatalistic pessimist Kaplan makes him out to be; on the other hand,
he insists that real changes (“adaptations”) have to be made if environmentally focussed
degenerations are not to occur with increased frequencies.
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The first divergence troubling me was one of modeling styles. Unlike Epstein or Holland,
Choucri has used either econometric modeling and nonlinear, feedback laden, Systems Dynamics
formulations. Territorial concepts figure in Choucri-North theories, and data-based models for
separate countries are the norm, but territory is not explicitly represented in her models. Structural
adaptation and environmental degradation are nicely handled by her non-linear feedback loops
(whose dynamics are so easily graphed by Systems Dynamics/STELLA software), but there are no
message-passing autonomous agents in her models; she and Rothenberg and most other modelers in
their style are not doing object-oriented programming.
The missing link was migration! If Choucri and North were to model their processes of
lateral expansion on territorial grids, and these territorial grids were to be like Epstein’s sugarscapes,
they would capture a new set of emergent interaction possibilities. Ironically, some of Homer-
Dixon’s best slides were of highly polluting sugar or prawn plantations located on low level
flatlands at the foot of, or in between, Philippine mountains where much poorer farmers held on to
their degraded, non-terraced, much less attractive production possibilities, or from which they
migrated to highly polluted city slums in increasing numbers. Obviously a later version of Epstein’s
software should have resource rich sugar spots on flatlands near the harbors, not way up in the
mountains. Various groups could migrate, trade and talk among themselves and with others, not just
view their unequally limited horizons, etc. Message passing could also be used as a control process,
to calculate systems wide environmental limits processes as well (simulating global warming,
nonrenewable resource elimination, etc.) The resource rich “high points” of his
societies/civilizations would historically have been river basins. A real shift to a more socially
complex simulation modeling style might well result.
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M od e l i n g h i s t or i c i t y o n t he s ug a rs c a p e s o f l i f e
A growing impression, throughout the meeting, was that much of what I have been working
on as a modeler over the last 20 years could conceptually and technically be fitted into what I called
“volume 2” of Epstein-Axtell’s project. Object-oriented LISP routines could be imbedded in
Epstein’s object-oriented PASCAL programs to explore new domains. This was a “pregnant
convergence” of projects par excellence. It would also help improve upon Choucri style modeling,
and transform it into the Artificially Intelligent SCHEME/LISP style of modeling that I now
advocate for socio-historical reasons.
Let me further try to set up this line of thought by first emphasizing a divergence. Both
Holland’s genetic algorithms and Epstein’s models are “low down” on the
Lovejoy/Boulding/Campbell Great Chain of Being mentioned above. Specifically, collectively,
socially, humans have evolved memory-rich, language-rich, imagination-rich, organization-rich
modes of problem-solving—firms, universities, markets, nations and even science itself—whose
mechanisms/processes/ capacities/ tendencies are not well represented in either Holland’s or
Epstein-Axtell’s models. To put it bluntly, there is some sociology, no cultural anthropology, no
politics, no law and no science in Epstein’s models. There are blue-dot-consuming “fights” on his
sugarscapes, but not the “games,” and certainly none of the “debates” that Rapoport wrote so well
about.
As explicated above, think of the discovery of historicity as the birth of the “time ordered,
[collective] self-understanding of a continuing human society.” Nations socialize their children into
the exploits of their founding heroes and great transitional actors, and the evils of their age old
enemies, with powerful effects: Le Pen is citing Joan of Arc to argue for throwing out the foreigners,
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the Bosnian Serbs are still throwing out the Turks! A lot of “projecting” of domestic enemies on to
international antagonists relies on this shared kind of “mythical” understanding. And since
Auschwitz and Hiroshima, many are trying to create a new, anti-nuclear-war and anti-genocidal
historicity for world society.
Now the operational implication for Epstein, vol. 2, of such kinds of thinking would be to
allow each of his actors individually and collectively, to have memories of past interactions, so that
the above kinds of historicity could be represented and their developments studied. There would be
both forgetting, and sharing of such memories. The “middle classes” higher up on the sugarscapes
could develop shared “understandings” of the kinds of interactions one typically has with those
lower down the scapes, or across the valleys. Color coding of actors in such memories could have
emergent effects like Holland showed us. Even without mimicking complex natural language
capabilities of the Chomskean sort, ethnic groups, classes and territorially structured states could be
modeled, and their memories imperfectly shared. Cultures, stereotypes, histories would be part of
the sugarscape world. Principles of political and territorial organization could be suggested, and the
identities, loyalties and understandings typically associated with them could be crudely, but
suggestively modeled. A higher level of organizational/jurisdictional/responsibility boundaries
could be identified (in a LISP-like way on territorial grids) allowing for the “tragedies of the
commons” style ecology/security dynamics mentioned in the Santa Fe discussions. Historical bases
for imagining new collective responses to these challenges could also be represented, and searched
for, if memories were allowed different kinds of empathetic, recreative ingenuity.
Obviously the past paragraph requires much elaboration and much new research before it is
filled out. But I would like to signal here a strong convergence between the programming styles of
contemporary MIT artificial intelligence programming and that of Epstein, Holland, and other Santa
20
Fe researchers.29 The key metaphor is the Piaget-Pappert-Minsky one: the society of mind works by
having differently capable, nearly autonomous agents, which have their own computational
capacities and also pass messages to each other. Hierarchical aspects of “thinking” abound as well,
but in flexible and sometimes ad hoc ways. Memory (“k-lines”) is also important, but limited.
Marvin Minsky ‘s Society of Mind book30 might be inadequate as brain science, but it presciently
and correctly conveys the programming style of some of his most illustrious students (Winston,
Hewitt, Sussman, Winograd, Stallman, Haase, Mallery, etc.) The extension of this style of modeling
to the social domain is very incomplete, but nonetheless promising. I think of P. R. Cohen, J.
Morgan and M. E. Pollack, Intentions in Communication 31, as a start; and Duffy and Mallery’s
previously cited work on RELATUS.32 Bennett’s simulations and the work stimulated by Bremer
and Mihalka, Cusack and Stoll, and Duffy’s parallel processing respecifications of Exploring
Realpolitik , are related, previously cited suggestions.
E f f e c t i v e Sc e na ri o M ak i n g Ne e d n ot b e M od e l B a se d
A third convergence at Santa Fe was, I think, not fully anticipated. When I publicly repeated
a private suggestion that our future thinking would be scenario based, not model generated, a
problem arose. What was the point of modeling, anyway? One of our members correctly
anticipated that scenario-based future explorations would themselves generate model-based
exercises, not vice versa. With his own considerable experience in advising decision makers, Dr.
Zhenghua Jiang’s accounts of the ways he presented different scenarios in between best and worst
possible cases generally supported the view that modeling and future thinking could be
symbiotically related. But again we would not be able to derive the future from our models, or all
relevant alternatives.
21
The convergence of the practice of the workshop to such anticipations was nearly exact.
Thus Brian Arthur’s worries about North-South style class conflicts, or subnational/transnational
dual economies focussed our thinking nicely. Nathan Keyfitz has written about a global middle
class—itself a model sketch developed in demographic, yet non-Malthusian, reaction to the Limits to
Growth debate.33 Murray Gell-Mann added Brave New Worlds style class/race politics to this
scenario. We could add the increased or decreased legitimization of genocide and nuclear war.
Nonetheless the heuristic role of the sugarscapes models could clearly be seen. Alternatives to the
Keyfitz-Arthur-Gell-Mann scenario developed further in the conversation; ideas for specialized,
model-based research were generated. Even a range of possible actor classes in the scenarios
explored in CLAW’s final report were identified.
None of the above convergences can be taken for granted. None of the ideas sketched above
is fully fleshed out. Each is somewhat dependent on the others. Nonetheless, I think these three
convergences are sufficiently exciting to suggest that they imply new areas for future work by the
Santa Fe Institute, new areas of collaboration in the social sciences domain, new ways of moving
SFI research closer to the global realities of war and peace. Certainly, the challenges raised at that
seminar have inspired a new line of my own research, on introducing historicity into ecologically
oriented, multi-agent, adaptive models. This is a line of thinking which Professor Seki has already
begun explore. I hope others will continue to do so, because I believe historicity-rich modeling
traditions better allow global citizens to learn from, and teach about, the lessons of Hiroshima,
Auschwitz and Chernobyl as well.
22
IV. Tow ard Bett er, St ill Re vi sabl e, O nt ologie s
To help fulfill the emancipatory promise of peace research, our concepts, as embodied in
these models and simulations, need to contain a way of recognizing the practices constituting such
past realities while at the same time containing the possibility of transcending them through
revisions in their reality-codifying practices. As Hiroharu Seki has argued concerning the
significance of the end of the Cold War, we “should include our political will [,..our] moral
leadership as one of the most significant variables....[W]ithout the preference of ontology to
epistemology or without the preference of subjectivity to objectivity...we can not start the road
towards solving any kind of the global problematique.”34 Our ontologies of the real, the possible, the
desirable and the awful, the necessary and the impossible must be revised to make such progressive
development possible. I see Professor Seki as someone trying to redress the balance in a world of
social scientists too committed to materialist and positivistic metaphysics.
Up until this point, except concerning the meaning of historicity, I have used, but avoided
detailed discussions of, ontological issues of primarily a philosophical or metaphysical sort.
Unfortunately, many social scientists are embroiled rather unprofitably in an
epistemological/ontological debate between materialistic “realists,” “idealists” and “constructivists”
regarding essences and phenomenal appearances, ontologies and epistemologies, natural and social
realities. Some participants in such debates might attempt, with some success, philosophically to
unravel and criticize the language of “ontologies” with which I have structured the present
discussion . But my focus here has been more operational, pointed toward the design of historicity-
friendly, peace-research-relevant, computational event representation practices.
Rather than engage further in such discussions here, let me suggest briefly some exciting new
directions in social scientific research grounded in more sophisticated conceptions of social reality
23
than much of the existing literature of International Relations, conceptions with which I am closely
identified. These were completed or published since much of the present text was written, yet they
speak directly to the main points I have made.
For example, Gavan Duffy has proposed reconstructing event data analysis using the
philosophical insights from Quine, Goodman and Hilary Putnam. He accepts Putnam’s notion of
“internal realism” as a preferred alternative to either a “copy” or a “correspondence” theory of truth,
and rejects both a copy theory or a constructivist theory of world-making. Metaphorically, both the
mind and the world jointly make up themselves.
Each person cognitively encodes a version of the world which no one can identify as
‘objective truth,’ in the copy theory sense… For internal realists, we each believe our
versions right only in the sense and to the extent that they cohere with our other ideas. These
include our conceptual constructs, our internalized norms, our perceptual fields, our life-
experiences, and even our mental models of the world versions that those with whom we
sociate disclose to us in discursive and practical action.35
Duffy then goes on to suggests principals for a representationally sophisticated, yet scientifically
replicable, computational hermeneutics, based significantly on his years working with John Mallery
and others in the development of the RELATUS system.
In a remarkably similar vein, the philosophical computer scientist Brian Cantwell Smith has
proposed a middle ground between materialist and idealist metaphysics (conceived of at least partly
in terms of revisable computational ontologies, the sustained metaphor of this present discussion).
He suggests a philosophy of presence governed by :
symmetrical realism: a commitment to One world, a world with no other, a world in which
both subjects and objects…are accorded appropriate place…[T]hat world is depicted as one
of cosmic and ultimately ineffable particularity: a critically rich and all-enveloping deictic
24
flux…[which] sustains complex processes of registration: a form of interaction, subsuming
both representation and ontology…[But] registration [has] metaphysical zest: the fact that all
distinctions and stabilities – empirical, conceptual, categorical, metaphysical, logical—are
taken not, at least not necessarily, and not in the first instance, to be “clear and distinct,”
sharp, or in any other way formal, but instead to be, or at least potentially to be, wily, critical,
obstreperous, contentious, and in general richly eruptive with fine structure.36
Here is a world with plenty of room for moral imperatives, political differences, and postmodern
anti-essentialism, yet a world that Smith is suggesting we replicably explore with computationally
facilitated symbolic procedures.
Finally, I call to my reader’s attention to a wonderful (yet horror filled),
phenomenologically sophisticated, LISP-encoded account of many counterfactual possibilities
inherent in the overlapping and intersecting political worlds of what Russians usually call “The
Caribbean Crisis” and Americans call “The Cuban Missile Crisis.” Schmalberger suggests that
this crisis “was about humiliation, prestige and leadership. It was a drama played before the
world in which deception commonly used to enhance one’s own prestige at the expense of the
other, threatened to destroy the face of the protagonists.”37 Without reducing these interactions
to causal models, Schmalberger provides text-based, phenomenologically grounded
reconstructions of 66 conversation-like “turns” in the crisis, and analyzes this sequence
counterfactually, generating alternative scenarios full of sobering reflections about the
rationalistic self-misunderstandings of the key players. These counterfactual reconstructions of
the political process facilitate deep learning about that brought the world the closest it has come
to nuclear war since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
If the next generation of International Relations scholars can build further on these fine
contributions to a nuclear-war avoiding future, Professor Seki and I should be content.
NOTES
1 Parts of this essay were included in an earlier article, “Putting Historicity into Adaptive, Multi-agent Simulations: So that Hiroshima and Auschwitz Might be Remembered but not Repeated,”Ritsumeikan Journal of International Affairs , Vol. 9, No. 4 (March 1997), pp. 125-132, rewrittenwhile I was a Sabbatical Visitor at the Santa Fe Institute in the Winter and Spring of 1995 from amemo prepared shortly after an earlier Santa Fe Institute conference addressing a “Crude Look atthe Whole.” A Japanese version of the present, post-visit reflections will appear in a Memorialvolume for Professor Hiroharu Seki, late of Ritsumeikan University, edited by Seiji Endo andMakoto Kobayashi, and published by Yushindo Publishers. Exonerating them completely frommy failings, I would like to acknowledge the contributions to my thinking of W. Brian Arthur,Robert Axelrod, Nazli Choucri, Joshua Epstein, Murray Gell-Mann, John Holland, StuartKauffman, Christopher Langton, George Lakoff, Melanie Mitchell, and Thomas Ray. Inredrafting this paper, I have particularly benefited from the suggestions of ThomasSchmalberger.
2 One of the broader and more thoughtful treatments of the recent discussion in the war/peacecontext is Ted Hopf, “The Promise of Constructivism in International Relations Theory,”International Security , Vol. 23, No. 1 (Summer 1998), pp. 171-200. For a British variant ofsocial constructivism, see Tim Dunne’s excellent historical-analytical account, InventingInternational Society: A History of the English School , Macmillan and St. Martins, Houndmillsand New York, 1998; for a continentally oriented discussion of ontological themes reminiscentof some of the issues raised during SFI workshops on economics and cognition which Iattended, see Fred Dallmayr, Between Freiburg and Frankfurt: Toward a Critical Ontology ,University of Massachusetts Press, 1991.
3 I have in mind especially Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report onKnowledge , University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1984. See also Jim George,“Understanding International Relations after the Cold War: Probing the Realist Legacy,” Chapter 2in Michael H. Shapiro and H. R. Alker, eds., Challenging Boundaries: Global Flows, TerritorialIdentities , University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1996. In a discussion of the corrupted,nightmarish consequences of the Enlightenment’s “narrative of reason, knowledge and freedom,”George suggests we “connect the ascent of the modern, rational subject with the experiences ofHiroshima and Auschwitz.” (Ibid., p. 54) Without denying the connections – John von Neumann fitsinto both narratives – I should state my view that the Enlightenment’s scientific and politicalcontributions, although flawed, are far too important and valuable to be summarily dismissed.
4 “The first and most intellectually taxing task when building a large knowledge base is to designan ontology.” From Paul Cohen, Rogert Schrag et al., “The DARPA [U.S. Defense AdvancedResearch Projects Agency] High-Performance Knowledge Bases Project,” AI Magazine , Vol. 19,No. 4 (Winter 1998), pp.25-49, at p. 26.
5 Event data are typically nominal, ordinal or interval scale “measurements” of the kind or degreeof cooperation or conflict between two parties, based on media accounts. For a scientificallyrespectable review and extension of this literature see Richard L. Merritt, Robert G. Muncasterand Dina A. Zinnes, eds, International Event-Data Developments: DDIR Phase II , University of
Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1993. The present paper continues my discussion in that volume of“Making Peaceful Sense of the News.”
6 H a y wa r d R. Al k e r , J r ., a n d Ron a l d D . Br un ne r , " S i m ul a t i n g I nt e r n a t i on a l Co nf l i c t : A Com p a r i so nof T hr e e A pp r oa c he s," I n t e r na t i o na l S t ud i e s Q ua r t e r l y , XI I I , 1( Sp r i n g 1 96 9) , pp . 70- 110 .
7 The “post-structuralist/post-modern” discussion of ambiguous, simulated international eventsby Baudrillard and Virilio was introduced into academic International Relations by James DerDerian and Michael J. Shapiro, eds. International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings ofWorld Politics , Lexington Books, Lexington, MA, 1989; James Der Derian, Anti-Diplomacy:Speed, Spies and Terror in International Relations , Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1991; and JamesDer Derian, The Virilio Reader , Blackwell, Malden, MA and Oxford, UK, 1998.
8 This section presents, in abbreviated and revised form, the substance of my provocativelyentitled1986/87 memo, “Against Historical/Disciplinary Genocide as a Prerequisite to History’sScientific Dissection: Putting Historicity at the Center of Events Data Research,” publiclydistributed as part of my compilation of prepanel “Discussion Drafts” for an September 1987APSA panel I organized about future possible directions for the Data Development inInternational Relations project headed by Richard Merritt and Dina Zinnes. The compilation titlereflected the panel’s constructive focus: “Desiderata for Data Archives on Foreign Policy andInternational Relations.”
9 See chapters 5 (“Can the end of Power Politics...”) and 10 (“Emancipatory Empiricism”) of myRediscoveries and Reformulations: Humanistic Methodologies for International Studies ,Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 1996. The first paper was originallygiven in 1977, the later first published in 1988.
10 Our scholarly impoverishment in ontologically conceiving or phenomenologically representinghistorical connectivity is evident in the small number of ways in which International Relationsscholars now talk operationally about it. Reaching back into the humanities, and toward thetechnically advanced fields of (computational) linguistics gives at least 8 overlapping alternativeoperationalizations of “historicity”:1) the Arthur-David-Keohane-Krasner literature on cybernetic, path-dependent, probabilistic
(urn selection) processes;2) Weiner-inspired cybernetic discussions of nonergodic development;3) Elster-discussed rewrites of electro-magnetic hysteresis (defined by Webster as “the
influence of the previous history or treatment of a body on its subsequent response to a givenforce or changed condition”). But how about:
4) the legal-diplomatic traditions of practical argumentation begun by Thucydides’ pre-Socraticteachers and distilled in recent technical-philosophical literatures by Rescher, Loui andWalton on practical/dialectical argumentation;
5) derivation-dependent parsing, already clearly illustrated in Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures and visible in the context-sensitive rewrite rules of text linguistics;
6) the Artificial Intelligence literature on non-monotonic reasoning, inspired perhaps by thelexically scoped functional definitions and recursivity of LISP/SCHEME, which has thehistorically suggestive property that theses are tentative and reversible, that axiomatic
presumptions may change in the course of arguments, thus invalidating previously derivedconclusions;
7) the ethnomethodological/phenomenological literature on scientific development and“members’ time”?
8) And – in writings no more obscure, but surely more ambiguous, than contemporary formallanguage theory – Hegel’s phenomenologically inspired discussions of Reason and Spirit inHistory?
Several of these sources are explored further in my Rediscoveries and Reformulations, op. cit.
11 The importance of regional contexts of meanings – and the relevance of covariance andregional factor analyses for multiplicatively reformulating relevant operational hypotheses andconceptual indicators – is an often neglected component of contemporary statistical training inInternational Relations. See my “The Long Road to International Theory: Problems of StatisticalNonadditivity,” World Politics , 18,4 (July 1966): 623-655.
12 See the discussion and citations in Chapter 1 of my Rediscoveries and Reformulations .
13 A clarification of this concept and more t h ou ght s o n i nf or m a t i on a l a n d h i st or i c a l o nt ol o gi e s a r e of f e r e d i n m y " Bi t F l ow s, Re wr i t e s a nd Soc i a l T a l k : T ow a r d s Mor e A de qua t e I n f or m a t i o na l On t o l og i e s ," i n T o da i S ym p os i um '8 6, I n f o r m a t i o n a nd i t s Fun c t i on s , I n st i t ut e of Jou r n a l i sm a n dCo m m uni c a t i o ns St u di e s, Un i v e r s i t y o f T oky o, pu bl i sh e d i n 19 88) . S e e a l so t h e p i on e e r i n gdi sc uss i on s i n Ga v a n Du f f y , Gue st E d i t o r , Ne w Di r e c t i o ns i n E v e nt Da t a An a l y si s , I n t e r na t i o na l I n t e r a c t i o ns , 20 ,1- 2 ( 19 94) : 1 - 1 68. Re c o nst r uc t i ng t he m e t a pho r i c a l ( a nd he nc e n ot m e t a p hys i c a l l yne c e ssa r y) b a se s o f m uc h o nt ol o gi c a l t h i nk i n g a bou t hum a n a f f a i r s i s a pr i nc i pa l a c h i e v e m e nt of Ge or ge L a k of f a nd Ma r k Joh ns on, Ph i l oso phy i n t he Fl e sh : T he E m bod i e d M i nd a nd i t s Cha l l e n ge t o W e st e r n T hou ght , Ba si c Bo ok s, Ne w Y or k , 1 99 9.
14 The relevant citation is Frederick Olafson’s The Dialectic of Action: A PhilosophicalInterpretation of History and the Humanities , University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1977.Further discussion of this seminal, partly Heidiggerian reformulation, is contained in my “ThePresumption of Anarchy in World Politics,” Chapter 11 of Rediscoveries and Reformulations .
15 Harold Lasswell, World Politics and Personal Insecurity , Reprinted in Harold D. Lasswell,Charles E. Merriam and T. V. Smith, A Study of Power , Free Press, Glencoe, Ill., 1950(originally 1934).
16 Besides the various articles in the Duffy edited issue of International Interactions, there areseveral practically oriented efforts to get increased purchase on the voluminous body of dailynewspaper accounts. For a thoughtful but modest effort to use linguistically-informed methodsof event characterization, see Deborah J. Gerner, Philip A. Schrodt, Ronald A. Francisco, andJudith L. Weddle, “Machine Coding of Event Data using Regional and International Sources,”International Studies Quarterly , 38,1(March 1994): 91-120.
17 A recent relevant paper on such conversational modalities of practical reasoning is Donald A.Sylvan, Thomas M. Ostrom and Katherine Gannon, “Case-Based, Model-Based, and
Explanation-Based Styles of Reasoning in Foreign Policy,” International Studies Quarterly , 38,1(March 1994):61-90.
18 The chapters by Mallery and Duffy in Duffy, ed., op. cit., are the most recently publishedinternationally relevant discussions of relevant procedures. See also H. R. Alker, Jr., G. Duffy,R. Hurwitz and J.C. Mallery, “Text Modeling for International Politics: A Tourist’s Guide toRELATUS,” in Valerie Hudson, ed., Artificial Intelligence and International Politics , Westview,Boulder, CO, 1991; and the more dialogically oriented study of “Language Games: DialogicalAnalysis of INF Negotiations, “ by Duffy, Brian K. Frederking, and Seth A. Tucker,International Studies Quarterly , 42,2 (June 1998), 271-294.
19 The rest of this section recasts an unpublished memo prepared originally in April 1994 for the“Crude Look at the Whole” project at the Santa Fe Institute. It’s original title was “SomePregnant Convergences Observed at the CLAW Workshop.” Jerome Rothenberg and NazliChoucri commented helpfully on the earlier version. Both its composition and my visit to SFIwere centered around the working out of my concern with war-avoiding historicities, the mostcentral “rediscovery” of my earlier research, as represented and further developed inRediscoveries and Reformulations.
20 Th e m ost i m po r t a nt , a c c e ss i bl e b oo ks of t h e se sp e a ke r s a r e Jo hn H. Ho l l a nd 's Hi dd e n Or d e r : Ho w Ada pt a t i on Bui l d s Com p l e xi t y , Ad di s on W e sl e y, Re a di ng , Ma ., 1 99 5; a nd J osh ua E p st e i n a n dRo be r t Axt e l l , Gr ow i ng Ar t i f i c i a l S oc i e t i e s : S oc i a l Sc i e n c e f r om t h e Bot t om Up , Br ook i ng s,W a sh i ng t on , D.C., 19 96. Rob e r t Ax e l r od ha s a s i m i l a r , hi g hl y a c c e ss i bl e b oo k, T h e E vo l ut i o n o f Co m p l e x i t y , Pr i nc e t o n Uni ve r si t y Pr e ss , P r i n c e t on , 1 99 7. Th e hi g hl y s ugg e st i v e w or k o f o ne of Ax e l r od ’ s st ude nt s , L a r s- E r i k Ce de r m a n, E m e r ge n t A c t or s i n W or l d P ol i t i c s , wa s a l so p ubl i sh e d by Pr i n c e t on Pr e ss i n 1 997 ; h i s " Com p e t i ng I d e n t i t i e s : An E c o l o gi c a l Mo de l of N a t i ona l i t yFo r m a t i on," E u r o pe a n J ou r na l o f I nt e r n a t i on a l Re l a t i on s , Vo l . 1( 3 ) : 33 1- 3 65 , i s a g ood i n di c a t i on o f so m e of t h e boo k's c ont e nt s.
21 S t u a r t A. Br e m e r a n d M i c h a e l M i ha l k a , " Ma c h i a v e l l i i n Ma c hi na : Or P ol i t i c s a m o ng He xa g ons ," i n K a r l W . D e ut sc h e t a l ., Pr ob l e m s o f W or l d Mo de l i ng , Ba l l i nge r , Bo st o n, 19 77. ( T hi s b oo k a l so c o nt a i n s a n e m p i r i c a l l y c o r r obo r a t e d , g e og r a phi c a l l y st r uc t u r e d , a da pt i ve , m ul t i - a ge nt pr e de c e s sor of Ce de r m a n’ s a nd Du f f y ’ s m o r e r e c e n t w or k ,: Ja m e s P . Be nn e t t a nd H. R. Al ke r , Jr ., “ ” W he n Na t i ona l S e c ur i t y Po l i c i e s Br e d Co l l e c t i ve I nse c ur i t y: T he W a r of t h e P a c i f i c i n a W or l d P ol i t i c sSi m u l a t i on ” ) . Al so , se e T . R. Cus a c k a n d R. J. St ol l , E x pl or i ng Re a l p ol i t i k: Pr o bi ng I nt e r na t i on a l Re l a t i o ns T h e or y w i t h Com p ut e r Si m ul a t i on , L y nne Ri e n ne r , 1 99 0. A r e c e n t p a p e r of t h e i r s,Co l l e c t i ve S e c u r i t y a nd St a t e S ur v i v a l i n t h e I nt e r s t a t e S ys t e m ,” I n t e r na t i o na l S t ud i e s Q ua r t e r l y ; 38 ,1 ( Ma r c h 1 994 ) : 3 3- 60, c o nv e r g e s i n t h e m a t i c s wi t h one by E pst e i n o n c ol l e c t i v e s e c ur i t ye m e r ge n t o ut c om e s. Wor t h t h e a ddi t i ona l s e a r c h t i m e a l so i s Ga va n D uf f y, " Conc ur r e n t I nt e r s t a t e Co nf l i c t S i m ul a t i o ns : T e st i n g t he E f f e c t s of t h e S e r i a l As su m pt i on [ i n Cus a c k- S t ol l ' s m ode l ] ," Ma t h e m a t i c a l a n d Com put e r Mo de l l i n g , Vo l . 16, 8 / 9( 199 2) : 2 41- 27 0.
22 T he l i ke l y a c c e ss i b i l i t y of t h e E CH O m ode l i n a n e a si l y r e p l i c a bl e a nd r e vi sa b l e f o r m a t , t h r ou ght h e use of t he SW A RM m o de l i n g p l a t f o r m de v e l ope d a t SFI by Chr i st o ph e r L a n gt on a nd h i sa s so c i a t e s , m a y a r gu e f or t r yi n g t o i nt r od uc e r i c h e r hi st o r i c a l c a pa c i t i e s i nt o E CHO r a t he r t ha n t he E p st e i n - Ax t e l l " Su ga r sc a pe " m od e l . Se e Al ke r a nd Si m on Fr a s e r , " O n Mod e l i ng Hi st o r i c a l
Co m p l e x i t y : " Na t ur a l i st i c " M ode l i n g App r oa c h e s f or m t he Sa nt a F e I ns t i t ut e ," pa pe r p r e s e nt e d on Au gu st 31, 1 996 a t t he Am e r i c a n Po l i t i c a l Sc i e n c e As soc i a t i o n m e e t i n g.
23 Re f e r e nc e s he r e a r e t o m y s e l e c t i ve su m m a r y of se m i na r di sc uss i on s. A go od ov e r a l l i n t r o du c t i ont o G e l l - Ma nn 's vi s i o n o f S FI r e se a r c h i s h i s T h e Qua r k a n d t he Ja gua r : Ad ve n t ur e s i n t h e Si m pl e a n d t he Co m p l e x , W .H. Fr e e m a n, Ne w Yor k, 19 94.
24 S e e t h e d i s c us si o n a nd c i t a t i o ns i n m y “ A r i st o t e l e a n P ol i t i c a l Me t h odo l og i e s,” Ch a p t e r 2 of Re di sc o ve r i e s a nd Re f or m ul a t i on s .
25 N a z l i Cho uc r i , Ro be r t Nor t h , a nd Su sum u Y a m a ka ge , T h e Cha l l e ng e o f J a p a n: Be f o r e W or l d W a r I I a nd A f t e r , Ro ut l e dg e , L o ndo n & N e w Yo r k, 19 92 .
26 N a z l i Cho uc r i , e d ., Gl ob a l Ac c or d: E nv i r onm e nt a l Ch a l l e n ge s a n d I nt e r n a t i on a l Re spo nse s , MI T Pr e s s, Ca m br i dg e , 19 93; ot he r r e l e va nt c i t a t i on s t o Cho uc r i a nd he r c ol l a b or a t o r s a r e i nc l ud e d i nt h i s vo l um e ' s Bi bl i o gr a phy .
27 F e b r ua r y 19 94 i ss ue , p p. 44 - 75 .
28 T ho m a s Ho m e r - D i xo n, " E nvi r o nm e nt a l sc a r c i t i e s a nd v i ol e nt c onf l i c t : E v i de nc e f r om c a se s," I n t e r na t i o na l S e c u r i t y , 19 ,1( 199 4) : 5 - 40 ; T ho m a s H om e r - D i x on, " T he I n ge n ui t y Ga p : Ca n Po or c o un t r i e s Ad a pt t o Re so ur c e Sc a r c i t y ? ," Po pu l a t i on a nd De v e l opm e nt Re vi e w , 21 ,3( Se p t e m be r 19 95 ) : 587 - 6 12.
29 A g ood ov e r vi e w v ol um e on g e ne t i c a l go r i t hm s a s a pp r e c i a t e d by SF I r e s e a r c h e r s i s M e l a ni e Mi t c he l l , An I nt r odu c t i on t o G e ne t i c A l go r i t hm s , MI T P r e s s, Ca m br i d ge , 19 96 .
30 S i m on a nd S c hu st e r , Ne w Y or k, 198 7. An i n t e r a c t i v e CD- Rom v i de o w i t h t he sa m e t i t l e a n dMi ns ky' s n a r r a t i ve i s a va i l a bl e f r om T h e V oy a ge r Com pa n y, Ne w Y or k . ( I S BN 15 594 045 58 )
31 M I T Pr e ss , 199 0.
32 I n V. Hud so n, op.c i t ., Ch a p t e r s 4 , 15, 16 . Se e a dd i t i ona l c i t a t i on s i n n ot e s 9, 12 a n d 1 4 a bo ve .
33 See his contribution to Karl W. Deutsch, Bruno Fritsch, Helio Jaguaribe and Andrei S.Markovitz, eds., Problems of World Modeling: Political and Social Implications , Ballinger,Cambridge, MA, 1977.
34 H i r oha r u Se ki , " H ow Nu c l e a r W e a po ns W e r e Re l a t e d t o t h e E nd of t h e Col d W a r ," pa p e r pr e s e nt e d t o t h e H i r osh i m a S ym p osi um on " T he Fi f t y Y e a r s o f Nuc l e a r W e a pon s," H i r o sh i m a ,Se pt e m b e r 17 , 1 996 .
35 Gavan Duffy, “Events and Versions: Reconstructing Event Data Analysis,” pp.147-167 inDuffy, ed., 1996. The quotation is taken from a discussion on p. 148f.
36 Brian Cantwell Smith, On the Origin of Objects , MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1996, p.347f.
30
37 Thomas Schmalberger, Dangerous Liaisons: A Theory of Threat Relationships in InternationalPolitics , Ph.D. Thesis #581, Institut Universitaire de Hautes Études Internationales, Genève,1998. The quotation is from his Introduction, p. 5.