Abstract for: Improving E-SAM: Statistical Demographics, Sentiment & Social Identity

This paper introduces three of several recent enhancements to the emerging-state actor model (E-SAM) simulation. These enhancements improve the fidelity of statistical demographics, sentiment, and social identity. These enhancements also include the identification of credible, publicly available, and reliably updated data sources allowing E-SAM to be instantiated in over 80 countries through the World Values Survey (WVS). This survey has been conducted in waves from 1981-2022 with the 8th wave planned for 2023-2026. To test these capabilities, we conducted four prototype experiments for different scenarios at different times in different regions of the world. These include recreating the original ISIS case study in Syria & Iraq 2010-2020; calibration of simulated vs. historical sentiment in Ukraine 2013-2023; Ukraine again for a hypothetical post-conflict stabilization scenario 2022-2032, and a hypothetical humanitarian aid mission after a major natural disaster in Myanmar in 2028. The experiments demonstrated the wide versatility of E-SAM to model different patterns of conflict and demonstrated that the enhancements have taken the time of instantiating an E-SAM simulation from weeks to hours.