Application Background: Modeling Tribal Leadership Dynamics

• Goal /Aspiration for Project
• Aid in understanding the social dynamics of leadership selection in Pashtun tribal society and the effects of extremists on the traditional consensus selection of leaders
• Support success in US counterinsurgency in Afghanistan through a better understanding of the tribal leadership dynamics
• Describe the dynamics of Pashtun leadership selection and the changes resulting from the addition of extremists to the system
• Enable assessment of the efficacy of alternate strategies through understanding how the structure of the social network, as well as local events and local changes, affect leadership selection
• Approach/Methods/Models
• Simulation modeling provides a framework that is flexible enough to accommodate recent and future changes in tribal society and dynamics and also allow the integration of quantitative data as it becomes available.
• Opinion dynamics models capture the propagation of an opinion value across a social network. As individuals interact, their opinions change depending on how different those opinions are. This presents a suitable paradigm to examine the flow of opinions concerning potential leaders within a Pashtun community and the effects of changes in these opinions on the leadership balance of power.
• A conceptual model of tribal leadership selection abstracts the three major leadership roles and tribal members as nodes and their social connections as links between these nodes. This conceptual model is instantiated as a bounded confidence opinion dynamics computational model.
• Status, Accomplishments and Next Steps
• The preliminary results and analysis demonstrate the value of this approach. The model accurately reflects the triad of authority roles (Secular Leader: Kahn, Government Agent: Malik, Religious Leader: Mullah) and the even distribution of leader selection if left unmodified. The model also demonstrates the unbalancing effect of the addition of an extremist to the social network and the subsequent tipping of power to the religious leader.
• As information becomes available concerning the tribal social networks, this information can be incorporated into the network generation process.
• CASoS Goals: General Capabilities
• The model also has the potential to analyze metrics defining political power, explore the effects of extremism on tribal members, examine the effects of loss of a leader and how possible replacements might be identified, and ultimately phase in quantitative data such as demographics, social connections, spatial locations, external events, and individual movement.
• This model represents an ideal of the historical leadership situation. Recent events have disrupted and/or altered this dynamic in multiple ways depending on location. Adapting this model to accommodate other leadership configurations and including other pressures influencing opinions such as the loss of current or potential leaders, the effects of an influx of money, etc. may also be helpful and add insight.
• Acknowledgements
• This research has been supported in part by an Intelligence Community (IC) Postdoctoral Research Fellowship
• Sandia National Laboratories supported this work through the Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program