Agent-based modeling of social conflict, civil violence and revolution: State-of-the-art-review and further prospects

Abstract

In this paper, we present a state-of-the-art review of Agent-based models (ABM) for simulation of social conflict phenomena, such as peaceful or violent street protests, civil violence and revolution. First, a simplified characterization of social conflict phenomena as emergent properties of a complex system is presented, together with a description of their macro and micro levels and the scales of the emergent properties. Then, existing ABM for simulation of crowd dynamics, civil violence and revolution are analyzed and compared, using a framework that considers their purpose/scope, environment representation, agent types and their architecture, the scales of the emergent properties, the qualitative and quantitative understanding of the phenomena provided by the results obtained from the models. We discuss the strengths and limitations of the existing models, as well as the promising lines of research for filling the gaps between the state-of-the-art models and real phenomena. This review is part of a work in progress on the assembling and dynamics of protests and civil violence, involving both simulation of the assembling process and the protest dynamics, as well as data collection in real protest events, and provides hints and guidelines for future developments.