| Work in the social science literature has explored the pathways and links between resource scarcity and inter-group violence. Forester, Meadows, Choucri and North, Bennett and Alker, Axtel and Epstein, Lansing and Homer-Dixon have developed ecological models that have sought to explicate the connections between scarcity, violence and non-violence and resource management. This dissertation adds to this body of "model-oriented literature" by creating a focused synthesis of approaches in order to explore different patterns of pathways and the conditions under which they form.; This goal is accomplished by combining the System-Dynamics approach of Homer-Dixon with the Agent-based approach of Epstein and Axtell and Holland's adaptive agents in Complex Adaptive Systems. The Homer-Dixon dialogue offers a rich narrative on the links between resource scarcity and violence, but is highly embedded in context, making the search for patterns very difficult. The Epstein and Axtell dialogue adds the ability to analyze patterns and examine pathways explicitly, but lacks population densities, agent adaptation, agent memories and differing means of economic production necessary to endogenize human ingenuity and the transmission of ideas. Holland provides the last missing element; adaptive agents sophisticated enough to simulate the effect of ingenuity and communication. Combining these three bodies of literature into a focused synthesis results in the Scarcity as a Complex Adaptive System (SCAS), a theory of scarcity, violence and non-violence that shows how sustainable, non-violent economies can form in the face of limited resources.; The validation of SCAS against historical data consists of three steps. First, can SCAS reproduce the same mechanisms that are seen in the Systems-Dynamics and Agent-Based approaches? The second test is to see if the critiques of the two component 7 approaches have been answered. Can SCAS deal with the embeddedness of the Systems-Dynamics approach while adding enough sophistication to produce patterns in the real world? The final step is a further empirical validation of SCAS against cases that can test if the model is successful at revealing patterns observable in the real world. The results are encouraging, suggesting that SCAS can provide a detailed picture of the relationship between resource scarcity and inter-group violence. |
