Introduction
The Coherence Based Modeling of Cultural Change and Political Violence (CCPV) is a three-year project funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR Contract FA9550-07-1-0253). It commenced on February 1, 2007 and is scheduled to close on November 30, 2009. It was funded through the AFOSR's general Broad Agency Announcement (BAA 2005-1) and is administered under the Federal Demonstration Partnership.
The ultimate objective of this project is to set up a prototype-level agent-based simulation system that will allow users to analyze the long-term effects of different policies on configurations of culture (ideologies, values, and beliefs) in specific localities of the world, and also predict the effect of this cultural change, in interaction with economic and political structural conditions, upon the level and targets for violent collective action in such localities. The simulation system will inform users which policy alternatives are most likely to minimize long-term violence and offer inference traces that allow policymakers to see the relevant information and logical inferences that led to each of its conclusions.
The system will encode its agents with cultural information based on available quantitative data, content analysis of ethnographic and historical documents, as well as through innovative virtual communities crawler based upon social network and cultural theories, all validated and supplemented by regional studies specialists. In addition, up-to-date and empirically tested social science theories of both cultural change and human decision-making will be implemented into agent algorithms to predict individual and group behavior, whose assumptions in turn will be tested through computer-mediated experiments.
In order to accomplish these tasks, the project has been divided into four main teams, each responsible for a subset of tasks, but in regular communication with one another: Social Science Theoretical, Social Science Empirical, Area Studies and History, and Computer Science.
Figure 1 provides a graphic illustration of CCPV project interdependencies.