The guerrilla war in Afghanistan pits tribes against a colonial power. This form of guerrilla war is put into perspective and used to develop a simple dynamic mathematical model describing (1) the macrocombat interactions between the Afghan guerrilla forces and the Soviet and Afghan regular armies, and (2) the support of the guerrillas by the population. We perform various simulations using parameter values derived from guerrilla wars in South Sudan, Malaysia, and Yugoslavia. Most of our scenarios show that the guerrillas are relatively successful during the period retained for analysis (1980-1985) and inflict relatively heavy losses on Soviet forces. Only a very large Soviet escalation (over 300,000 troops) could make a difference, and even then, the resistance would be hard to eradicate because of the support of the population and the primitive state of the country.
In this concluding chapter, Allan and Keller posit that Just Peace should be defined as a process resting on four necessary and sufficient conditions: thin recognition whereby the other is accepted as autonomous; thick recognition whereby identities need to be accounted for; renouncement, requiring significant sacrifices from all parties; and rule, the objectification of a Just Peace by a ‘text’ requiring a common language respecting the identities of each, and defining their rights and duties. This approach, based on a language-oriented process amongst directly concerned parties, goes beyond liberal and culturalist perspectives. By moving beyond the idea of a peace founded on norms claiming universal scope, each side of a conflict has a place at the negotiating table to present their own perspective on what justice might entail. This inclusion into the decision-making process helps create the feeling of personal investment in the final negotiated product. In addition, negotiators need to work towards building a novel shared reality as well as a new common language to help foster an enduring harmony between previously clashing peoples.
The increasing popularity of game modeling in international relations theory has fostered a tendency toward theoretical elegance to the detriment of empirical concerns. In this article attention is focused on the empirical implications of a series of choices that users of game theory must make when they model social interactions. In particular, possible trade-offs between theoretical complexity and empirical robustness are evaluated. This is done both abstractly and with specific references to recent modeling efforts in the fields of security and international political economy.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.