A Roadmap to Realistic Computational Models of Civil Wars

Abstract

Civil wars arguably pose the most serious problem to security in the contemporary world. Since the end of World War II, internal conflicts have become much more frequent than wars among states (Sollenberg and Wallensteen 2001). Accordingly, it does not come as a surprise that most conflict analysts have increasingly come to shift their research toward civil wars (Lake 2003). There is a vibrant, interdisciplinary literature that applies sophisticated research methods, including statistics and formal modeling, to such conflicts (Sambanis 2004).