Climate variability, opposition group formation and conflict onset

Abstract

Political Science has a rich heritage of trying to understand how time-invariant geo-physical and geo-political features impact the calculus of peace and war, within and among societies. The growing body of climate change evidence has encouraged the re-examination of such questions yielding a variety of hypotheses which attempt to explain how weather variations can trigger societal and civil conflict. We develop an agent-based, predictive analytic model for subnational conflict onset. We model the preferences and influence of citizens in geophysical space and capture the emergence of groups and the diffusion of support and opposition across society using cooperative game theory. We then model the interaction of groups and the government utilizing non-cooperative game theory to ascertain conflict onset. Such a method empowers us to ascertain the duration and magnitude of environmental shocks which would most prominently lead to conflict within societies with specific demographic and wealth characteristics.