Rebel and Regime Adaptation in a Civil War Setting

Abstract

Civil wars represent one of the most heinous forms of disagreement between human beings. The level of violence seen in some civil wars far outrank most interstate conflicts in casualty figures from pure military activity and civilian collateral damage. A civil war disrupts the political and economical foundation of a society and decimates inter-human relations to an extent where people turn against their own neighbors. Despite the destructiveness of these conflicts they are more common than wars between state actors in the post WWII period. Current research in the field is rather limited to large-n studies of civil war initiation and termination than devoted to understanding the dynamics behind the development of these types of conflict. The shortcomings in the literature are in most part attributable to the lack of appropriate data, consequently there has been little research into the development of the highly dynamic systems that develop in civil war settings. This thesis seeks to replicate the biological model of competing species in a civil war setting, in an attempt to confirm that regime and rebel adaptation decreases casualty figures, to a level where continued co-adaptation for interactive participants become unfeasible, thus ending the war. Simple hypotheses from current literature have also been identified and examined to discover if they apply to the case under scrutiny. The competing species model return results for the Spanish Civil War confirming the presence of interaction and that subsequent adaptation lowers casualty figures for both rebels and regime. Casualties are the main variable impacting a side's ability to continue the conflict since a lack of soldiers eliminate the actor's fighting potential thus ending the conflict.