Modeling Peace Building in Nigeria
BY D.F. DAVIS
In 2006, Mason’s Peace Operations Policy Program developed a simulation data base on conflict prevention and peace building in Nigeria. This effort was sponsored by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s Consultation, Command and Control Agency (NC3A) using funds from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The source of funding, in itself, made this a unique project.
NATO is not planning any operations in Nigeria, nor is the US Department of Defense. The choice of country was made to provide the simulation with a dynamic anchor to the real world. The country selected for this knowledge base development was dependant in part on other work being used within the US Government’s (USG) interagency planning and experimentation program. This experimentation process has two major new activities named Unified Action 2007 (UA07) and Multi-National Experiment 5 (MNE5). UA07 is primarily a US interagency experiment, whereas MNE5 is being conducted by many nations in cooperation with the USG.
Each UA07 and MNE5 chose to place the geographic location of the experiment in sub-Saharan Africa. It was designated as a nonviolent experiment, focusing on stabilization, nation building and/or humanitarian relief. Initially there was much concern on the part of the US Department of State and the US Department of Defense that nothing being portrayed should undermine US policy in the region or be subject to misinterpretation from the US allies in the area. Therefore, the narrative surrounding the project was designated as relating a conflict prevention and peace building environment in the near future Nigeria. It was also found to be important to include the Government of Nigeria (GoN), at least notionally, as the lead organization in the knowledge base and simulation. This proved to be problematic.
MODELING IN NATO
Most Modeling and Simulation (M&S) in NATO has been conducted to reflect the outcomes of combat operations. Very little work has been done on the outcomes of non-combat operations. This situation is slowly changing. NATO and NATO nations have conducted more than a hundred combat simulations, but only six or so recognized simulations that may be used to analyze the potential outcomes of stability operations or humanitarian actions. This absence of models is partially responsible for the lack of detailed and mature planning in these non-war fighting domains.
Designing M&S for stability or non-war fighting applications requires a different point of view than that used in designing the combat simulations. Even with the new simulations, the knowledge base that is represented in the simulation is created by the military analyst. These scenarios are often developed with no input from alternative paradigms and the political, governance, rule of law, economic, infrastructure, societal and other aspects of an operation are short changed or left out. At best, these non-combat aspects are added in after the more traditional military activities are represented.
The NC3A asked the question: Can a non-war fighting scenario (simulation knowledge base) be developed from a multi-agency perspective? The attempt to answer this question was the underlying purpose of the research effort. The model used and the scenario chosen were secondary. It is apparent, however, that the three elements of this research are intimately connected: model, scenario, and purpose.
The Zeta tool, a generic timestep-based dynamic simulation, tracks the values of effects, actions and societal conditions over time as impacted by organizations, programs and incidents. As such, Zeta is not optimized as a combat tool.
During the development of a knowledge base for the Zeta simulation, it was evaluated for its ‘face’ validity. Face validity is defined as the apparent plausibility of the results given the inputs and conditions as judged by knowledgeable experts. Zeta could not be explicitly validated due to substantial verification issues. Zeta was judged, in as far as possible, to be valid at the surface level. The analytic techniques of multi-attribute utility analysis, as the underlying technology, have been shown to be generally applicable to multi-objective modeling. Therefore the results obtained from the various scenarios simulated were plausible. The level of plausibility will depend upon the expertise that the knowledge base encodes. The level of the participating experts’ sophistication and the degree of depth of the elicitation will directly impact this validity. The Zeta software itself is still a prototype and the version used was not very robust. Difficulties were uncovered that reduced the ability of the team to validate the simulation.
The figure below shows the major elements of the knowledge base that were needed to develop the scenario. Each of these will be expanded in more detail. However, it is important to understand that the scenario elements are almost all subjective judgments based on input from a group of experts.
CREATING THE KNOWLEDGE BASE
The primary elements of the knowledge base were the hierarchy of goals and objectives and the hierarchy of societal conditions. The model works by stating the goals of the mission and applying resources to these goals to set societal conditions. The societal conditions are then impacted by spoilers and incidents which impact the goals for the next time period. The resolution or granularity of the simulation is dependent on the resolution and granularity of the set of goals, conditions, resources and spoilers and the modeler’s ability to represent the relationships between these four entities.
In order to do this for the Nigerian scenario, a series of workshops were held with experts on Nigeria, Africa and modeling. The first workshop was conducted to organize the effort and to develop the scenario outlines. A second workshop was held to scope the scenario and to agree the specifics of focus and location. The third workshop was held to develop the details of the knowledge base (scenario).
The results of the knowledge base development depended on the level of expertise invited to the workshops. The team was exceptionally well informed and the participants were all experts in the field. However, there was only one representative of the Nigerian government in the workshops and that participation was guarded. Therefore, the resulting data base is subject to critique from an overall stand point, but was sufficient for the question asked.
The results will be discussed in terms of the hierarchies chosen. The most important hierarchy was that of the goals and objectives of the simulated conflict prevention and peace building activities. The table below is an extract of the goals and objectives hierarchy used.
This list was derived from a series of sources and from the interaction of the participants at the workshops. Only the first two levels are shown here. The driving philosophy behind this list is based on the need for a political system that is stable and responsive, coupled with the rule of law and the capacity of the government to provide the social justice required. The requirement for civil order and the use of military and police forces, while included, is seen as subordinated to the civilian lead aspects of the required activities.
Societal conditions were modeled based on the emerging metrics program from the US Institute of Peace and based on the book Quest for Viable Peace. The issues examined were the impact of progress towards the goals and objectives on security, governance, rule of law and social well being. Each of these conditions can be assessed by the presence of conflict drivers adversely impacting them and of capacity building efforts to support them.
After the workshop, participants agreed that the goals, objectives and metrics for two other sets of data had to be developed. These were the organizations and programs that were seen to be supporting and actively working to achieve the goals and objectives, and, the spoilers and incidents that were actively engaged in detracting from the societal conditions and metrics. These lists were developed using the structure of the Nigerian government and the programs of the World Bank, the US, UK and other donor nations.
Spoilers and incidents were developed from a review of three years of international media reports on Nigeria. These reports were subjected to a contents analysis and then synthesized into spoilers and incidents that were compatible with the simulation.
STUDY OUTCOME
The work described resulted in a first draft of a simulation knowledge base for conflict prevention and peace building in Nigeria. This knowledge base has been loaded into the Zeta simulation and initial runs of the simulation have been made. The verification and validation problems addressed earlier have restricted the team’s ability to determine any strong findings. However, there are several interesting outcomes that are illustrated below. The figure below shows the results of the first 12 months of the base case simulation.
An interpretation of this chart is that the organizations and programs that were put in place focused on conflict resolution capacity (Dark Blue), the political system (Medium Blue) and economic development (Light Blue). This was not, however sufficient to overcome the culture of corruption (Black) which pulled down the security (Medium Gray) and rule of law (Light Gray) implementations. Although this is a plausible outcome, it is not counter intuitive nor does it, in itself, point towards mitigating or ameliorating possibilities.
It is, however, sufficient as a base case. It is clear that this analysis has done no more than scratch the very surface of the use of modeling and simulation techniques in Nigeria. The study team is currently working on a follow up effort to create an experimental design that will take the analytic approach further. The sponsor is also continuing to fund efforts to further the validation process of these techniques. The effort was a success, but only in its very early stage of possibility.
Modeling and simulation using tools developed for combat operations can be used to conduct analysis of non-combat operations. What was not discussed here, however, is the acceptability of these approaches to the governmental and policy communities who may not yet be comfortable in using this type of analytic approach.
D. F. Davis (ddavis@gmu.edu) is the director of the Peace Operations Policy Program at the School of Public Policy (http://policy.gmu.edu/). This article was first published in print and citations have been removed due to space limitations, but are available from the author.
