Scenarios of social 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 thoughtout

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.