VBI

In the early 1990s, Sierra Leone entered into nearly 10 years of civil war. The ease of accessibility to the country's diamonds is said to have provided the funding needed to sustain the insurgency over the years. According to Le Billon, the spatial dispersion of a resource is a major defining feature of a war. Using geographic information systems to create a realistic landscape and theory to ground agent behavior, an agent-based model is developed to explore Le Billon's claim. Different scenarios are explored as the diamond mines are made secure and the mining areas are moved from rural areas to the capital. It is found that unexpected consequences can come from minimally increasing security when the mining sites are in rural regions, potentially displacing conflict rather than removing it. On the other hand, minimal security may be sufficient to prevent conflict when resources are found in the city.

Immediately after the 2007 Kenyan election results were announced, the country erupted in protest. Riots were particularly severe in Kibera, an informal settlement located within the nation's capital, Nairobi. Through the lens of geosimulation, an agent-based model is integrated with social network analysis and geographic information systems to explore how the environment and local interactions underlying Kibera, combined with an external trigger, such as a rumor, led to the emergence of riots. We ground our model on empirical data of Kibera's geospatial landscape, heterogeneous population, and daily activities of its residents. In order to effectively construct a model of riots, however, we must have an understanding of human behavior, especially that related to an individual's need for identity and the role rumors play on a person's decision to riot. This provided the foundation to develop the agents' cognitive model, which created a feedback system between the agents' activities in physical space and interactions in social space. Results showed that youth are more susceptible to rioting. Systematically increasing education and employment opportunities, however, did not have simple linear effects on rioting, or even on quality of life with respect to income and activities. The situation is more complex. By linking agent-based modeling, social network analysis, and geographic information systems we were able to develop a cognitive framework for the agents, better represent human behavior by modeling the interactions that occur over both physical and social space, and capture the nonlinear, reinforcing nature of the emergence and dissolution of riots.