Factional Conflict Through the Generations: Theory and Measurement.

There are some kinds of violent conflicts between factions in which one generation of belligerents trains a successive generation to continue and! or enlarge the scale of conflict in an arena where the hostilities are internecine A model is developed of the devolution of internecine conflict using the lexicon of game theory and the simple mathematics of probability Assumptions pertaining to the behavior and attitudes of factions are transcribed into mathematics to formulate a theory of conflict resolution The theory is general enough to be applied to the struggles in the Middle East as well as to warfare among youth gangs The chief proposition to emerge from the analysis demonstrates how the statistical incidence of aggressive and peaceable factions varies over time The time path has the characteristics of a stochastic process with estimable parameters [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]