Joslyn Barnhart and I are organizing a workshop on “Evolutionary Approaches to Peace Science” in conjunction with this year’s Peace Science Society meeting at the University of Tennessee. The workshop will be hosted at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis on 24 October. Information is below.
If you would like to participate, please email me sometime this week. The workshop is conditional on a threshold number of participants, if there is enough interest we will send out an email with more information by the end of the month. Also, please pass along this announcement to anyone, especially graduate students or post-docs, that you think might like to attend.
Existing evolutionary approaches to peace science have focused, independently, on a wide range of evolutionary processes at a wide range of physical and temporal scales. However, it is likely that they happen simultaneously and have interesting interactions.
1) Policy learning and diffusion of successful policies
2) Normative and ideational change through “cultural selection”
4) Computational and mathematical models of international conflict/cooperation
This workshop is intended to further a discussion of how to integrate these approaches into a useful whole, with a focus on mathematical and computational modeling and empirical techniques.
The format of the workshop will depend on the number of participants and their specialties and topics of interest. If the group is smaller, we will have a few “big picture” talks followed by facilitated discussion. If the group is larger, we will likely divide the work into sub-groups who will report back to the larger group at the end.
Please contact us or comment below if you have any questions or suggestions.