‘Attracted to Conflict’ book by AC4’s Peter Coleman reviewed in JASSS

Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation or JASSS reviews the book Attracted to Conflict: Dynamic Foundations of Destructive Social Relations

Vallacher, Robin R., Coleman, Peter T., Nowak, Andrzej, Bui-Wrzosinska, Lan, Liebovitch, Larry, Kugler, Katharina and Bartoli, Andrea
Springer-Verlag: Berlin, 2013
ISBN 9783642352799 (hb)

Attracted to conflict packs a big promise: “The perspective developed in this book was motivated in part by the inability of traditional models of social relations to impose coherence on the multifaceted nature of conflict in human affairs”.

The book is compiled in a somewhat cumulative fashion, featuring multiple sections and subsections per chapter, but is nevertheless well structured. Chapters 1-3 introduce necessary concepts and terminology. Chapters 4 and 5 introduce computational models and discuss their implications. The concluding chapters 6-8 discuss lessons learned and articulate policy implications.

Theoretically, the book is centered around the notion of “intractable conflict”, referring to conflicts that are more persistent, destructive, and resilient to resolution than others. The authors argue that these conflicts are ruled by their own set of principles, which they try to identify and model. Two research traditions inform their approach: insights from experimental social psychology and the complexity sciences. In direct comparison, conflict research based in political science or sociology is somewhat underrepresented, which is certainly regrettable. Some of the most distinguished political scientists of the twentieth century have combined insights from psychology to explain war and peace, and mentioning the legacies of Lewis Fry Richardson, Karl Deutsch, Kenneth Boulding, and Herbert Simon in passing would have added a lot to the literature review. Instead, a section entitled “Ignoring relevant theory and research” on page 146 laments that nonlinear dynamical systems are omnipresent in nature and that “a deep, comprehensive, and heuristic account of this phenomenon [intractable conflict]” critically relies on corresponding theory. Continue reading here…