TechKnowlogy Magazine—June 2001
Note: this article gives a good description of the PeaceLab/CoLab simulation process. It was written to be one of the features in the inaugural edition of a new, online journal devoted to gaming applications edited by some leading technology gamers — good idea but, like many of the ‘dot.com’ ideas, it didn’t get off the ground.
By Larry Seaquist Chairman & CEO, The Strategy Group
In the spring of 1999, NATO went to war for the first—and let us hope the last—time. As high-tech bombs and missiles rained down on targets in Serbia and Kosovo, as nearly a million Kosovars took flight from their homes, sixty professionals met in Amman, Jordan in a PeaceGame to map out the end of the conflict and search for a path which would lead to a durable peace in the Balkans.
The gamers knew a lot about refugees and bombs. They were Palestinians, Egyptians, Jordanians, and Israelis. About a third were Jordanian military officers who had commanded UN blue helmet peacekeeping troops in various countries, including in the Balkans. All were participants in an advanced simulation called a PeaceGame, an upside-down wargame designed by The Strategy Group and our co-sponsor, Jordan’s Institute of Diplomacy. 2
Our objective was not to coach NATO or the UN on peacebuilding in the Balkans. We had picked the Balkans as a case study, a less-emotional proxy for the long-term tensions in the Middle East. We were looking for insights into the challenge of building a practical conflict-prevention mechanism in the Middle East, a region which traditionally has looked to outside mediators. Our sixty participants divided into teams and took on the roles of the major groups tangled in the Balkans war: some played the aggressive Serbs, some the fleeing Kosovars, some the attacking NATO forces, some the international aid agencies rushing to assist the flood of refugees. One team, dubbed the Ministers of Chaos, played the role of the opponents of peace—all those spoilers who profit from conflict and resist anyone’s peacebuilding.
The outcomes? Several. At a personal level, all the participants reported fresher, deeper insights into the many problems to be solved if a durable peace is to emerge out of the wreckage of fighting and the hatreds of refugees. The roots of peace in the Middle East and in the Balkans are deeper than negotiations to end fighting. Most importantly, the game players agreed that peace in both regions was more than possible, that it was the only acceptable route forward. Seen through the lens of the simulation, there was enough congruence of interests among the disparate parties to start a long term peacebuilding effort. All wanted to repeat the experience and involve others.
Back in the U.S. two weeks later, with the NATO bombing still dominating the TV, 250 college students played the same game at the U.S. Naval Academy not far from Washington, D.C. A mixture of American military cadets and civilian students from universities around the world, the young people tackled the same problem the Middle Eastern professionals had taken on. Could they find a way to move out of the fighting in the Balkans to a durable peace?
Debriefing after the day-long exercise, the student teams came up with several different game plans for addressing the long term issues of economic reconstruction in Kosovo, for restarting multi-ethnic schools, and for using the Internet and distance learning technologies for inter-connecting the communities in the Balkans with each other and with the larger world. As with the Middle East gamers, there was a lot of deep, personal learning also going on. The military cadets were especially energized by the glimpses they had of themselves in future conflicts. The simulations were showing them a need to become much different military professionals than formerly expected of combat officers who limited their craft to the arts of destruction on the traditional battlefield. The simulation—itself fed live TV news imagery of the actual combat and refugee situations in Kosovo—led them to the creation of innovative combinations of military force and civilian organizations in order to support village-level rebuilding.
The wargame laboratory.
In the wake of the French Revolution, Napoleon changed the scale and character of war. Needing to train generals in the new complexities of combat before they risked troops in real battles, Nineteenth Century Prussian military leaders invented the wargame. At the height of the Cold War a century later, wargames had become elaborate tools both for training generals and for testing war plans. The U.S. Naval War College, for example, hosted an annual simulation of World War III attended by hundreds of officers. Dozens of computer systems modeled the attrition and logistics of thousands of simulated battles among airplanes, tanks, and ships per designs worked out by officers enacting the echelons of command as BLUE (NATO) fought RED (the Soviets).
Complicated as generalship in war may be, citizenship in peace is vastly more challenging. War, after all, is generally limited to two sides, each furnished with diplomats and warriors, each aiming to overpower the other. Peace, even at the level of a simple community, involves many more players acting in many more arenas in an infinitely intricate web of cooperative-competitive relationships. Contrary to what we’ve been taught, war is easy. It is peace that is difficult.
It was not until the end of the Cold War that military strategists like me thought much about peace. We considered peace a military product—the result of a successful war or, in the form of pre-war deterrence, the successful threat of war. Peace was passive, war was the work to be studied, wargames were the strategist’s laboratory.
All that changed profoundly in the early 1990’s. Neighbor-on-neighbor killing replaced organized fighting among soldiers. “Community war”—usually incited by malevolent, often criminal leaders—emerged as the characteristic form of violent conflict. 3 With the change of venue came an enormous increase in destructiveness. We soon learned that once inflamed, common citizens armed with the ordinary knives and small arms of family life could be as deadly as a nuclear bomb. We also saw that once started, the hatreds and violence of community wars could roll on and on.
In sum, community war was headed in exactly the opposite direction from where we military strategists thought organized conflict was going. We called for ever-higher technologies for weapons, community warriors were using machetes and old pistols. We were trying to minimize casualties, those behind neighbor-on-neighbor killing sought to maximize the violence and trauma. We designed shorter and shorter, “decisive” wars; community wars perpetuate themselves for decades and generations. The most astonishing revelation: the dynamics of community war are almost impervious to traditional military action. As we saw in action after action, modern, high-technology, high-firepower military units cannot win battles against the inflamed, low-tech rabble of community war.
Implication One: prevention is imperative. Community war has to be stopped before it starts. Implication Two: peace is no longer the product of military operations. Whether it is the peace of prevention or the peace of reconstruction, peace is the achievement of the very citizens who would otherwise be at each other’s throats and seizing each other’s homes. But peace created by a community is vastly different from peace delivered by an army. It was time to go back to the laboratory, but to the laboratory of peace games not wargames.
Wargames and PeaceLabs.
First principles: If peace is now a process, not a product—the work of the community itself, not the gift of an outside military force—then efforts at peacebuilding and prevention must be locally led. I.e., any intervention must be limited to facilitation. Unlike outside interventions like humanitarian disaster relief, one can encourage and strengthen but not replace local capacities.
Second, the whole community must be considered. Unlike most development projects which focus on one particular leverage point in a local society and its economy, peacebuilding must inherently embrace the whole community: all its significant players, all the significant interactions. Third, no two communities are alike. Each must tailor its own peacebuilding or prevention strategy to its own circumstances. Finally, note that “community” may refer to a local town, clan, district or to the national, sub-regional, or regional level. The modeling of the PeaceLab needs to accommodate all those complexities and variations. And it needs to be simple enough that the local group can, with a bit of coaching from our peacebuilding scout, design and run the process for themselves.
What does this upside-down wargame look like? Organized by a local Design Team which itself is coached by a Strategy Group professional, the participants gather in a simple conference room for an introduction to the game and to the scenario. Then, dividing into teams representing the major actors in the local situation, the participants put on those separate perspectives and examine the conflict confronting them. Periodically meeting in plenary session to learn of each other’s diverse views, the role-playing teams step through an exploration of the parties and issues. 4
Simple as this basic process sounds, it has enormous power to illuminate the complex differences which energize the conflicts in a country. But more than insights result. Used as a community consensus-building mechanism, a PeaceLab series can deliver a series of important peace-enabling outcomes.
Strategic peacebuilding in the simulation laboratory.
The essence of a functioning, peace-able community is communication—the various parties and factions and groups connect to and interact with each other. They may not always agree, but they will recognize each other’s views and motivations. Community war destroys those cross connections as it separates and divides the groups, leaving all fearful of all. Indeed, as we recall from Yugoslav President Milosevic’s manipulation of the Serbs through a series of Balkan wars, creating that fearful separation is the essence of the devious art of inciting and sustaining modern conflict.
The PeaceLab simulation disarms those hostilities. By mixing a diverse group of participants in various teams portraying the local constellation of key actors, the simulations enable a progressively more powerful series of achievements:
- Insight. By assuming the role of one set of actors and comparing those perspectives with the differing views of the other teams, individual participants rapidly gain a deep, personal understanding of the various motivations of the parties to the crisis—an understanding otherwise precluded by the stereotyping and hostilities which befog the citizenry.
- Reconnection. Having recognized each other’s views, fears, and hopes, the simulations enable the participants immediately to begin to connect with each other. In this regard the social intervals may be as useful as the simulation itself.
- Strategy. The role-playing teams then begin to spot the points of agreement that can be a foundation for a commonly agreed vision of what a durable, long term peace would look like. Often the PeaceLabs incorporate a cross-team interaction process at this point so the teams may work directly with each other to cement their agreements. Note that for a country deep into conflict and transfixed by violence and negotiations, this fresh, multi-party vision of the future can be especially valuable and compelling.
- Campaign. This is the transition to action. Acting out their differing equities in a future peace, the gamers assemble an action plan for a concrete, step by step march to solve the problems standing between themselves and their strategic goal. Later repetitions of the PeaceLab can be used to assess progress and adjust the game plan. Just as wargames train leaders and test war plans, PeaceLabs help develop community leaders and examine alternative peace plans. But the advanced simulations of the PeaceLabs are not the whole story. The goal is to launch a sustained campaign of practical peacebuilding.
Moving upstream to peacebuilding and prevention.
What happens? Here is the spine of a peacebuilding campaign from intervention through PeaceLabs to a concrete, self-sustaining action program as practiced by The Strategy Group’s Global Action Network of Professional Peacebuilders:
- Monitoring the globe, our peacebuilders’ network spots an opportunity, arranges the introductory contacts, designates a network principal as a scout, provides basic funding, and sends the scout.
- Surveying the local situation, our scout identifies local partner groups, charters a Design Team, then helps create and fund the startup—often through a training workshop leading to a PeaceLab.
- With our scout’s continued incubator assistance, the local group conducts a series of PeaceLabs to engage all the relevant parties, design an agreed strategy, and organize a peacebuilding campaign.
- Turning to potential funders and participants, we organize an “IPO”—an international peacebuilding opportunity—a marketplace where donor agencies, NGOs, and businesses find opportunities.
- As the local group leads the initial campaign forward, we help assess progress and adjust the plans.
- Building on that baseline, selected members of our core group of experts and/or the professionals from other organizations in our alliance enter the picture to initiate specialized community-building projects like economic self-development and “digital citizen” installations.
- Consolidating the work, we charter a local Strategy Group to join the network and help others. The modeling & simulation frontiers.
This is still work in progress with many interesting problems still to be solved. New ICT technologies and the wonders of new video simulations can boost the realism and level of detail. And ICT and Internet applications can vastly expand the range of players and how they interact.
Here are three examples of specific challenges; readers are invited to contact us with ideas. 5
Practical distance collaboration. A number of commercial software packages promise to deliver collaborative work spaces for virtual teams. So far, none meet the multi-dimensional, multi-party-at-a-distance needs of distributed PeaceLabs. We need urgently to solve this problem. The cost of physically assembling the participants at a single conference site is usually the largest component of the PeaceLab budget (although PeaceLabs are a fraction of the cost of development projects or emergency humanitarian aid missions). More important is the connecting function of the PeaceLabs. ICT-boosted gaming could multiply the regular contact between governments, among government agencies within a country, and between citizens and officials that is essential to a robust conflict prevention capacity. In the Middle East PeaceLab, for example, it is very difficult to assemble a face-to-face conference mixing Israelis and Arabs. How could we create practical, affordable ways of enabling those connections on a routine basis? (And “routine” means that the line charges for connecting one’s computer to the Internet must be affordable.) How could we load into that interconnectivity modeling and visualization software that would illuminate the practical problems of peace—the challenges of managing water supplies, finding employment for ex-soldiers, providing neighborhood security?
Digital citizenship. Once burning, the fires of community war suppress citizenship. Consider Colombia where individuals, whether senior officials or ordinary citizens, risk being shot by anonymous assassins for speaking out. It matters not what side or which issue. Someone with a gun and an agenda will be on the other side of any statement. This lethal atmosphere crushes citizenship. With citizens feeling disempowered and helpless, peace looks hopeless, and violence continues to reign. We need to develop “bullet proof citizenship”—innovative ICT and media applications to enable individual citizens to retain a sense of participation and contribution. A low-tech example: Suppose that the PeaceGames were broadcast on TV with citizens invited to phone-in or e-mail comments, perhaps even to vote on the various choices as the gamers assembled a peacebuilding strategy and action plan. How could that be done so that villagers in the half of the world without phones and electricity could enjoy full-citizen participantion?
Multi-community gaming. Some of the most powerful learning we’ve seen in PeaceLabs came from the direct interactions of people from two different countries and cultures, each with histories of conflict. Ideally, we would be able to inter-connect two of more communities in different parts of the world in an electronic sister city laboratory for mutual learning. This may be an especially powerful way of enabling young people to learn from and about each other. Our experimental gaming with urban high school youth is showing that the PeaceLabs have enormous power to energize young people not only to strengthen themselves, but to give them an outlet in community work for their natural idealism. How can we give an ICT boost to the PeaceLabs so that secondary school students can see, understand, and interact with each other as they tackle their communities’ peace problems? A closing anecdote.
One thing we’ve learned is to trust our local partners. No matter how poor and war-torn the country, there will be good citizens ready to lead their communities forward and able to add their own wrinkles to the PeaceLab process. One revealing instance from the Middle East PeaceGame illustrates:
During one of the game cycles when the teams had been proposing strategies for creating a long-term peace in the Balkans, the Jordanian economist leading the “Albanians” team reported that their team wanted to get computers and Internet connections into every Kosovar village immediately. They cited the usual goals of better education for their children, health care, etc. Then this spokesman went on to explain: “We want them to be able to do what we are doing in my home village in north Jordan,” he said. “With our computer lab and our Internet connection we are turning ourselves into the modern, electronic equivalent of a port city. We all know that port cities,” he continued, “are generally rich both economically and in ideas because of the people and goods that flow through the port. We want to use the Internet to gain the same advantages for our land-locked village. Our children will be able to grow up in the village yet have the sophistication about the world they would if they lived in a cosmopolitan port. And because they do have that sophistication, they will feel comfortable staying at home, and making their families and futures right where they are. Without that our village may die.”
Those are the kinds of peace-enabling insights that the simulations of PeaceLabs unleash. We invite you to unleash your own ideas.
- Following his 32 year career in the U.S. Navy as a warship captain and Pentagon strategist, Larry Seaquist formed the non-profit Strategy Group in 1995 as an independent, international “do tank” devoted to finding innovative approaches to practical conflict prevention and peacebuilding. See http://www.strategygroup.org/larry’s_bio.htm
- To learn more about the Strategy Group’s work see http://www.strategygroup.org
- To read the author’s August 2000 article, see http://www.usni.org/Proceedings/Articles00/proseaquist.htm
- For more on how to design a PeaceGame, see Part II of our on-line manual, Professional Peacebuilding at http://www.unesco.org/cpp/venice.html
- Ideas for practical ICT applications to the PeaceLab process and comments on any aspect of peacebuilding and conflict prevention are most welcome. Please send e-mail to the author at larry@strategygroup.org