From Complex Conflicts to Stable Cooperation

Jurgen Scheffran and Bruce Hannon
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
scheffra@uiuc.edu, bhannon@uiuc.edu

Conflict is a highly complex and dynamic form of human interaction, often emerging from incompatible actions, values and goals. To study the emergence and dynamics of conflict and the evolution of cooperation, we introduce a dynamic-game framework for modeling the interaction of multiple actors which pursue certain objectives by allocating their resources to various action paths. While conflict corresponds to an unstable and sometimes chaotic escalation, leading to a breakdown of social and natural systems, the actors can adjust their action paths towards cooperatively stabilizing their Nash equilibria and formation of stable coalitions. The model framework is applied to analyze the transition to cooperation in natural resource management and climate change.

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