Conflict Dynamics on Duplex Networks

Social conflicts among large groups of people can have serious and costly consequences that can exceed the time and space boundaries of the contentious groups. They require carefully thought-out strategies for addressing the contested issues. However, the complexity of social conflicts poses obstacles to their resolution. Not only is it difficult to find clear cause-and-effect relationships, but the conflict dynamics impede prediction of outcomes. For any group in conflict, strategizing to find a way out requires an approach that allows testing of the range of consequences of various strategies. Thus in complex situations, where predicting how the opponent will respond to a strategy is difficult, a party to conflict might engage instead in anticipation, generating and preparing for a range of possible scenarios. We draw from duplex networks modeling to further analyze a recently proposed scenario generating model of conflicts and illustrate its application with two examples.