Simulating cultural violence.

New simulation research in Science looks at cultural conflict. Results suggest that intermixing is great and otherwise large territories with discrete boundaries are best. The model as applied to Kosovo and present-day India gives some convincing figures. I'm giving the simulation the benefits of the doubt because it isn't my field, it is in Science, and because the senior author is the editor of a volume on complex systems theory that I bought back when I was into lots of stuff.

Reports

Global Pattern Formation and Ethnic/Cultural Violence

May Lim,^1,2 Richard Metzler,^1,3 Yaneer Bar-Yam^1* We identify a process of global pattern formation that causes regions to differentiate by culture. Violence arises at boundaries between regions that are not sufficiently well defined. We model cultural differentiation as a separation of groups whose members prefer similar neighbors, with a characteristic group size at which violence occurs. Application of this model to the area of the former Yugoslavia and to India accurately predicts the locations of reported conflict. This model also points to imposed mixing or boundary clarification as mechanisms for promoting peace.

conclusions:

Our results for the range of filter diameters that provide good statistical agreement between reported and predicted violence in the former Yugoslavia and India suggest that regions of width less than 10 km or greater than 100 km may provide sufficient mixing or isolation to reduce the chance of violence...

Our approach does not consider the relative merits of cultures, individual acts, or immediate causes of violence, but rather the conditions that may promote violence. It is worth considering whether, in places where cultural differentiation is taking place, conflict might be prevented or minimized by political acts that create appropriate boundaries suited to the current geocultural regions rather than the existing historically based state boundaries. Such boundaries need not inhibit trade and commerce and need not mark the boundaries of states, but should allow each cultural group to adopt independent behaviors in separate domains. Peaceful coexistence need not require complete integration.

Different cultures are spontaneously generated given spatial separation and sufficient population size, quite like speciation. But what do we do with the products, besides slowly work to end the influence of religion? Unlike speciation, we can interbreed and force our cultures to fuse with us!