Abstract for: Resilience in Civil Conflict and Implications for Intervention Policies: An integrative systems approach to policy design

The USG and others in the international community have adopted resiliency frameworks for designing and evaluating conflict intervention policies in both the security and development/aid sectors. These frameworks acknowledge the need for multi-level systems analysis that bridge security and development/aid domains. In practice, however, they tend to focus on either individual agent agency or system structure within single domains, and lack understanding of integrative causal mechanisms and dynamic feedback processes. In this paper, I demonstrate a theoretically grounded approach for combining individual agency and system-level dynamics at the nexus of security-development policy domains for evaluating impact of interventions on resiliency of various actors in instances of recurring armed civil conflict. Building on the work of (Choucri et al., 2007) to model state stability, I show how integrating individual agency with system dynamics can operationalize the USG resiliency framework for policy analysis of third party interventions through security and aid vectors. In so doing, sensitivity of combatant as well as societal resiliency to different vectors for implementing intervention strategies can be examined. The modeling framework is demonstrated for case studies of recurring conflicts.