Can They Deal? Conflict and Cooperation Networks in Collective Decision-Making

• In Event: Designing Security Institutions in Developing Countries

Abstract

The art of the possible requires the diplomat to weigh many factors when considering the option to negotiate: national interests, domestic constraints, and more. Such factors affect the choice to negotiate and the likely outcomes. Along with those factors, the diplomat must assess the other side. Can its leaders achieve a durable consensus amongst themselves? Can those leaders compel or cajole their followers to accept a compromise? This project focuses on the first question.

As witness to the other side’s decision-making process, the diplomat relies on twin assumptions to draw conclusions: cooperation indicates cohesion, hence stability; conflict indicates fragmentation, hence instability. In the diplomat’s assessment, stability is a necessary condition for negotiations; an unstable leadership cannot make or keep commitments. Except for rare cases, when individuals come together as a group, the decision-making process comprises conflict and cooperation. Therefore, the diplomat’s twin assumptions lead to a pessimistic assessment of the potential of negotiations.

This project examines the network level outcomes in processes of conflict and cooperation by simulating agent choices using decision rules drawn from balance theory. Existing bodies of work examine the evolution of cooperation under anarchical conditions and the consequences of conflict for performance. This project diagnoses patterns in the interplay of conflict and cooperation to understand the conditions under which the group might reach equilibrium and what kind of equilibrium that group might reach. After identifying baseline patterns, the project examines the effects of initial conditions – such as the size of the group, the distribution of cooperation and conflict, and the level of group activity – on the process of conflict and cooperation.

Initial findings indicate that most stable outcomes include conflict. Only small networks, dominated by conflict or cooperation, achieve stasis. Under other conditions, networks do not achieve stasis but exhibit ongoing transition between states that may have an underlying pattern. Thus, the diplomat’s assessment should pay attention to the conditions that affect the processes of conflict and cooperation rather than the appearance of them alone.

Author

• Alan Keith Dugger