In the early 1990s, Sierra Leone entered into nearly 10 years of civil war. The ease of accessibility to the country's diamonds is said to have provided the funding needed to sustain the insurgency over the years. According to Le Billon (2001), the spatial dispersion of a resource is a major defining feature of a war. Pires and Crooks (2016), developed an agent-based model in MASON using geographic information to create a realistic landscape and theory to ground agent behaviour to explore Le Billon's (2001) claim. The GUI of the model is shown in Figure below. Different scenarios were explored as the diamond mines are made secure and the mining areas were moved from rural areas to the capital. They found that unexpected consequences can come from minimally increasing security when the mining sites are in rural regions, potentially displacing conflict rather than removing it. On the other hand, minimal security may be sufficient to prevent conflict when resources are found in the city.
Graphical user interface of the Geography of Conflict Diamonds model showing the spatial environment centered upon Sierra Leone and charts recording agent activities (e.g. working, mining rebelling) and the model parameters during a representative model run.
Model Available at: https://www.comses.net/codebases/4955/. Alternatively for a more upto date version of the model see: https://github.com/eclab/mason/tree/master/contrib/geomason/sim/app/geo.
Reference: Pires, B. and Crooks, A.T. (2016), The Geography of Conflict Diamonds: The Case of Sierra Leone, in Xu, K. S., Reitter, D., Lee, D. and Osgood, N. (eds.), Proceedings of the 2016 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, and Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation, Washington, DC, pp. 335-345.
Click on the image below to see a YouTube movie of the model:
