On the Ontology of War and Peace
Hayward R. Alker
alker@usc.edu
web site URL: www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/ir/cis/cews/cews.html
The paper discusses two methodologies
of international relations research which would benefit from a linguistically
and historically sensitive multi-agent computational modeling and retrieval
perspective. The first, event data analysis, has used a quantitatively
oriented approach to coding news content. The author engages with the view
that disconnecting the social bonds between events and different individuals
or groups is a kind of methodological genocide, an error which can be avoided
or at least partially resisted by using sophisticated multi-perspective coding
practices.
The second is what one
might call first generation multi-agent modeling of cooperation and conflict
in the styles of Axelrod, Holland, Epstein and Axtell. Their exciting
work is criticized for the limited extent to which it contains social, legal
and historical phenomenon recognized by contemporary international relations
scholars to be of central importance to adequate descriptive and explanatory
accounts. This is even more the case when an emanciatory peace research perspective
on data making and analysis is preferred.
In both cases, the need
for richer, relational ontologies is highlighted. Concrete proposals for newer
approaches are outlined. The overall perspective of the paper is that of
Information Technology design research.