Good fences make good neighbors, scientists find
Sept. 13, 2007
World Science staff
Can the cold rea­son­a­ble­ness of math head off the
flam­ing irra­t­ional­ity of vi­o­lent con­flict?
May­be, say re­search­ers who this week re­ported that a
math­e­mat­i­cal mod­el can pre­dict where eth­nic
bat­tle will erupt.
Such stud­ies could help pol­i­cy­makers de­vise
so­lu­tions be­fore prob­lems get out of hand, the
sci­en­tists said. More than 100 mil­lion peo­ple have died in
vi­o­lent con­flict in the past cen­tu­ry, they added,
of­ten be­cause of clashes be­tween eth­nic­ally or
cul­tur­ally dis­tinct groups.
The in­ves­ti­ga­tors found that eth­nic­ally mixed
ar­eas with poorly de­fined bound­aries were prone to
con­flict. The stu­dy, by sci­en­tists at the New Eng­land
Com­plex Sys­tems In­sti­tute in Cam­bridge, Mass., and
Bran­deis Un­ivers­ity in Wal­tham, Mass., ap­pears in the
Sept. 14 is­sue of the re­search jour­nal Sci­ence.
The au­thors de­vised a mod­el based on the as­sump­tion
that vi­o­lence does­nt arise in highly mixed re­gions, since
no groups con­sid­er the space en­tirely their own.
Vi­o­lence is al­so un­likely in re­gions where groups are
sep­a­rate, be­cause they dont im­pose on each oth­er and
the bound­aries are clear. In­stead, par­tial separa­t­ion
with un­clear bound­aries fos­ters con­flict, the
re­search­ers said.
The mod­el ac­cu­rately pre­dicted the loca­t­ions of
re­ported con­flict in the form­er Yu­go­sla­via and in
In­dia, the sci­en­tists re­ported. In es­sence, they said,
the situa­t­ion is much as de­scribed by the po­et Rob­ert
Frost in a well-known po­em, good fences make good neigh­bors.
Vi­o­lence takes place when an eth­nic group is large enough to
im­pose cul­tur­al norms on pub­lic spaces, but not large
enough to pre­vent those norms from be­ing bro­ken, said
Bran­deis re­searcher May Lim. Usually this oc­curs in places
where bound­aries be­tween groups are un­clear.
Re­flect­ing an emerg­ing di­rec­tion in sci­ence
ap­plied to so­cial pol­i­cy, the study ap­plied
sci­en­tif­ic prin­ci­ples of pat­tern
forma­t­ionof­ten used to de­scribe, for ex­am­ple,
how chem­i­cals sep­a­rate by type or by stateto a thorny
so­cial prob­lem. The re­search­ers found that eth­nic
vi­o­lence oc­curs in pre­dictable pat­terns, just as do
oth­er col­lec­tive be­hav­iors in oth­er
phys­i­cal and bi­o­log­i­cal sys­tems.
The con­cept of pat­tern forma­t­ion, while it may have been
orig­i­nally de­vel­oped to un­der­stand
chem­i­cal sys­tems, is really a sci­en­tif­ic
mod­el of col­lec­tive be­hav­iors, in which you look at
those as­pects that con­trol over­all be­hav­ior, said
co-author and Com­plex Sys­tems In­sti­tute pres­ident
Ya­neer Bar-Yam.
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