Peter Brecke

Global climate change, war, and population decline in recent human history

Although scientists have warned of possible social perils resulting from climate change, the impacts of long-term climate change on social unrest and population collapse have not been quantitatively investigated. In this study, high-resolution paleo-climatic data have been used to explore at a macroscale the effects of climate change on the outbreak of war and population decline in the preindustrial era. We show that long-term fluctuations of war frequency and population changes followed the cycles of temperature change. Further analyses show that cooling impeded agricultural production, which brought about a series of serious social problems, including price inflation, then successively war outbreak, famine, and population decline successively. The findings suggest that worldwide and synchronistic war–peace, population, and price cycles in recent centuries have been driven mainly by long-term climate change. The findings also imply that social mechanisms that might mitigate the impact of climate change were not significantly effective during the study period. Climate change may thus have played a more important role and imposed a wider ranging effect on human civilization than has so far been suggested. Findings of this research may lend an additional dimension to the classic concepts of Malthusianism and Darwinism.

War and Reconciliation

Many scholarly disciplines as well as popular opinion recognize reconciliation as a powerful force in restoring social order following conflict. Reconciliation between countries following a war or a series of wars has attracted little attention from international relations scholars, however. This paper uses four international events datasets developed by others and a reconciliation events dataset assembled by the authors to determine whether reconciliation events lead to a discernable decrease in the level of conflict between former belligerents. The results suggest that reconciliation events signal a change towards more cooperative and less conflictual bilateral relations in a number of cases. The impact of reconciliation is hardly uniformly positive, however, and limitations of the data constrain what can be asserted. The paper concludes with thoughts on continuing this inquiry to determine the forces that give rise to reconciliation and the factors that might explain the variance in the dependent varia...

Integrated Global Models That Run On Personal Computers

This article presents work the author has done to port several of the integrated global models developed in the 1970s and 1980s to widely available personal computers. The goal has been to give teachers and researchers access to these models for educational purposes. The article briefly describes each model to. help a potential user decide which one(s) he or she may wish to obtain from the author.

The emotive causes of recurrent international conflicts.

Many international conflicts are recurrent, and many of these are characterized by periods of violence, including wars, that are hard to describe as planned products of rational decision-making. Analysis of these conflicts according to rational-choice international-relations theory or constructivist approaches has been less revealing than might have been hoped. We consider the possibility that emotive causes could better explain, or at least improve the explanation of, observed patterns. We offer three emotive models of recurrent conflict and we outline a method by which the reliability of emotive explanations derived from these models could be tested prospectively.

The Soviet global model: SIM/GDP

Integrated global models are computer simulations that have been developed over the past two decades to provide a unique tool for understanding global-scale problems and their solutions. This article describes a major global modeling effort conducted in the Soviet Union that until recently has been virtually unknown in the West. The sections of this article cover the orientation and thrusts of the SIM/GDP project and brief descriptions of key submodels.

A bibliographical report on six contemporary global models

Abstract At this time (Summer 1989) there are six integrated global models which are in use or development. These models go by the names: FUGI (Future of Global Interdependence), GLOBUS (Generating Long-term Options By Using Simulation), SARUM (Systems Analysis Research Unit Model), SIM/GDP (System of Integraded Models/Global Development Processes), WIM (Word Integrated Model), and WIOM (Word Input-Output Model). Several books and articles describe these as well as other either defunct or more narrowly defined (such as purely economic or climate oriented) global models. This work does not duplicate those efforts. It instead presents comprehensive bibliographies of the six models in order to providing a mere glimpse of what is there.

Towards a Characterization and Systematic Evaluation Framework for Theories and Models of Human, Social, Behavioral, and Cultural Processes within Agent-Based Models

An article in Science magazine (Bhattacharjee, 2007) discussed how the U.S. military is interested in enlisting the help of multidisciplinary scientific experts to better understand “how local populations behave in a war zone.” The article mentioned the “Human Social Culture Behavior Modeling” (HSBC) program at U.S. Department of Defense and indicated, through a few anecdotal examples, the types of prior research emanating from multidisciplinary fields that may be considered the state of the art.

A foundation for early warning: a taxonomy of violent conflicts

This paper establishes the foundations for a taxonomy of violent conflicts ranging from globalsystem-level interstate war to turf struggles between warlords within a country. The taxonomy is intended to facilitate research on the origins of violent conflicts; the goal is to enhance our ability to identify precursors to conflicts by more finely delineating the types of conflicts that erupt. The paper first reviews past efforts at conflict definition, compilation, and classification. It then describes a dataset being assembled that is a superset of all existing conflicts that the author could find. Notable about the dataset is use of sources, many in non-English languages, that have not yet been tapped by previous conflict datasets. The paper next articulates a theoretically defined set of variables for identifying and distinguishing conflicts that span both interstate and intrastate types. Finally, it describes the use of clustering techniques pioneered by numerical taxonomists to develop a taxonomy. In the process of developing a Conflict Alert System (CAS) a computerized system for identifying country situations that are likely to erupt into violence in the next 6 to 12 months, one quickly runs into the problem: What are the types of conflicts for which we wish to get early warning? The essence of the conflict early warning problem is to establish a mapping between some set of indicators that we can collect and the outbreak of a