Modeling Effect of Leaders in Ethno-Religious Conflicts

Abstract

Many incidents of ethno-religious violence in recent history have been associated with the fall of an authoratarian regime or have been perpetrated by dictators. These incidents underline the importance of the roles of political and/or religious leaders in the context of ethno-religious conflicts. In this paper, we extend the computational model of ethno-religious conflicts (based on repeated prisoner’s dilemma (PD) game in graphs) proposed in , to include the effect of the leaders of the different groups. We present simulation results showing some interesting emergent effects: (a) even when a high fraction of the population of the two groups are willing to compromise with each other, if the leaders are not willing to compromise, there is high potential of conflict between the two groups, and (b) when a majority of the two population groups are unwilling to compromise, even if the leaders are willing to compromise, there is still a high potential of conflict between the two groups. Our simulation results also show that the two groups can coexist in peace, i.e., there is low potential of conflict, when both the leaders and a large fraction of the population are willing to compromise.