Progress and problems in world modelling

Donella Meadows, John Richardson, Gerhart Bruckman, Groping in the Dark: the first decade of global modelling, Chichester, New York: John Wiley, 1982, xxvii + 311 pp. ?11.00. Harold Guetzkow and Joseph J. Valadez (eds.), Simulated International Processes: theories and research in global modelling, Beverly Hills and London: Sage, 1981, 400 pp. ?18.75. These two books should be welcomed enthusiastically by the international relations community. They describe economically the work done in two important and related fields with which scholars of international relations, no matter what their speciality, should be acquainted. This judgement may not, of course, be accepted by everyone, but I hope this review article will provide reasons in support of it. For even if one concludes (as I do not) that the approaches of these books are wrong, they are interestingly wrong. The two books have similar goals. Both are attempts to show what two research programmes in global politics have achieved after the expenditure of much time, much money (mainly, but not exclusively, dollars) and much intellectual effort. The books are directed at the outsider in that the insider in both areas will be familiar with virtually all they contain. The editors and authors provide sufficient material to give a clear picture of what is going on and to put the work in its context. We are thus able to arrive at some sort of conclusion on the overall legitimacy of their activities and on whether they have been fruitful. Practitioners commonly refer to 'global politics' rather than 'international relations' as the whole enterprise is broader in scope than just the relations between states. They address themselves to the social system of the planet, in which states are important actors. The research programme described in the book edited by Guetzkow and Valadez is the simulation work which, one way or another, traces its origins, usually fairly directly, to Northwestern University. The volume edited by Meadows, Richardson and Bruckman, describes a more heterogeneous collection of projects, the first of which is associated with Forrester and Meadows;1 the other projects have been to some extent devised as extensions or critiques of that initial project. In the first part of this paper I shall give an account of the two books and comment on them in conventional book review form. I shall then discuss the significance of this sort of work for the study on international relations and give some evaluation of the various activities involved.