Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/7565
Browse
5 results
Search Results
Item The Localized Nature of Violence in Iraq(2007-08) Gulden, Tim; Steinbruner, JohnUnderstandably and perhaps inevitably, the ever more urgent effort to comprehend the causes of violence in Iraq has so far relied on familiar conceptions. The conflict occurring there is variously described as an insurgency, a civil war, and a manifestation of global terrorism. Standard religious and ethnic categories are used to identify the participants and impute their motives. It is becoming evident, however, that the pattern of violence reflects not only a collision of organized purposes but more fundamentally a profound disintegration of Iraq’s social fabric, a process that exposes innocent victims but also limits the capacity of predators. Violence resulting from the breakdown of legal order does not have the same character as that which occurs between managed opponents. Better understanding of that distinction is likely to be one of the more important lessons to be learned.Item Adaptive Agent Modelling in a Policy Context(2004-12-16) Gulden, Tim; CISSMThis dissertation examines the utility of adaptive agent modeling (also referred to as agent-based modeling or individual based modeling) as a tool in public policy research. It uses the adaptive agent technique to produce useful results in three diverse areas. It demonstrates that the adaptive agent framework can be used to extend traditional models of comparative advantage in international trade, showing that the presence of increasing returns to scale in some industries shifts the basis of comparative advantage arguments, making room for industrial policy and the regulation of trade. Next, the dissertation demonstrates that the size distribution of cities within nations, generally thought to approximate the "Zipf" distribution, can be reproduced using a simple agent-based model. This model produces insights into the evolution of the distribution as well as departures from it especially in France and Russia. This understanding of urban dynamics has implications for easing the structural transition of the Russian economy and for designing policies to reduce the size of megacities in the developing world. The dissertation goes on to examine individual level data from the Guatemalan civil war from an adaptive agent modeling perspective. It finds several novel patterns in the data which may serve as benchmarks for adaptive agent modeling efforts and suggests avenues by which existing conflict models might be brought into closer accord with the data. The dissertation concludes that adaptive agent modeling is useful in a policy context because it allows quantitative work to be done while relaxing some of the unrealistic assumptions which are often required to gain analytical traction using traditional methods. The method is found to be particularly useful in situations where path dependence, heterogeneity of actors, bounded rationality, and imperfect information are significant features of the system under examination. The individual based nature of the method is also found to be well suited to assessing distributional impacts of changes in process or policy.Item Workshop on Indicators of Sustainable Development(2002-01-23) Gulden, Tim; CISSMA major accomplishment of the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg was an increased focus on implementing sustainable development: "words are good, actions are better." This results-oriented focus raises several important questions: What indicators are available for measuring progress towards our sustainable development goals? What is the quality of those indicators and the data upon which they are based? What international processes exist for creating and maintaining such indicators? How does the U.S. Government participate in domestic and international indicator efforts? This three-hour workshop was designed to educate senior U.S. policymakers on the current state of sustainable development indicators and stimulate discussion about how these indicators can be used to support our sustainable development objectives. Tim Gulden is a Research Fellow within the Advanced Methods of Cooperative Security Studies at the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland.Item The Internet: Boom, Bust, and Beyond(2002-10-28) Gulden, Tim; CISSMTim Gulden is a Research Fellow within the Advanced Methods of Cooperative Security at the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland.Item Decarbonizing the Global Energy System: Implications for Energy Technology and Security(2005-04-01) Fetter, Steve; Gulden, Tim; CISSMSince the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed in 1988, it has engaged a substantial proportion of those individuals with relevant scientific expertise in the process of forming reasonable judgments about the effects of aggregate human activity on the composition of the earth"s atmosphere and about the resulting implications for global climate. It is now widely agreed that in concert with other so-called "greenhouse gases," carbon dioxide (CO2) released from the burning of fossil fuels for energy is causing the earth"s climate to change. Over the last century, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere increased from about 300 to 375 parts per million by volume (ppmv), and global average surface temperature increased by 0.4 to 0.8 oC. In the absence of policies designed to substantially reduce global emissions, scenarios developed by the IPCC indicate that CO2 concentrations will reach 550 to 1000 ppmv in 2100 and that global average surface temperature will increase by an additional 1.5 to 6 oC (IPCC 2001a). The consequences of such a temperature increase and associated changes in precipitation patterns and other climate variables are a matter of greater uncertainty and disagreement. At the lower end of the range, it is possible that nothing of global consequence will occur, and that the regional and more localized effects will be moderate enough to be handled by natural adaptation. It also conceivable"particularly at the high end of the temperature range"that abrupt, nonlinear and fundamental changes could be triggered, such as a sudden change in large-scale ocean currents, with truly massive and potentially catastrophic consequences for human societies. The IPCC has identified the possibility of extreme danger, but has been and will remain unable to reach consensus on its exact character, magnitude, probability and timing. That situation presents an extraordinary problem of risk management. It is feasible in principle but monumentally demanding to limit the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases resulting from aggregate human activity. Moreover, the will and capacity to do so would have to be generated in advance of scientific consensus about the danger to be avoided. If business continues as usual, however, any scientific consensus that might form about catastrophic climate change is likely to emerge only after it is too late to take action to avoid it. Any effort to reduce emissions which restrains global economic output threatens the developing world with prolonged stagnation and hopelessness, setting the stage for increased civil conflict and international violence. Although the relevant relationships are not yet understood in detail, it is widely suspected that violence is generated by the sustained denial of economic opportunity. Thus, security in the globalized world economy ultimately depends on a more equitable pattern of economic development than has yet been achieved. Steve Fetter is dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. Tim Gulden is a Research Fellow at the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland.