Author's Keywords: conflict, attractors, repellors, systems theory, structure, state space, culture, polity, socioeconomy, Asia, Oceania, dissipation, order, entropy, violence, CONIS, Luhmann, Parsons	Convention Need a solution for abstract management? All Academic can help! Contact us today to find out how our system can help your annual meeting. Submission - Custom fields, multiple submission types, tracks, audio visual, multiple upload formats, automatic conversion to pdf. Review - Peer Review, Bulk reviewer assignment, bulk emails, ranking, z-score statistics, and multiple worksheets! Reports - Many standard and custom reports generated while you wait. Print programs with participant indexes, event grids, and more! Scheduling - Flexible and convenient grid scheduling within rooms and buildings. Conflict checking and advanced filtering. Communication - Bulk email tools to help your administrators send reminders and responses. Use form letters, a message center, and much more! Management - Search tools, duplicate people management, editing tools, submission transfers, many tools to manage a variety of conference management headaches! Click here for more information.
Association: Name: ISA's 49th ANNUAL CONVENTION, BRIDGING MULTIPLE DIVIDES URL: http://www.isanet.org
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Trinn, Christoph. "Conflict Attractors. System-theoretical and Empirical Modeling of Cultural, Political, and Socioeconomic Factors Structuring the Patterns of Internal Conflicts in Asia and Oceania" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the ISA's 49th ANNUAL CONVENTION, BRIDGING MULTIPLE DIVIDES, Hilton San Francisco, SAN FRANCISCO, CA, USA, Mar 26, 2008 <Not Available>. 2008-10-08 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p254309_index.html>

Trinn, C. , 2008-03-26 "Conflict Attractors. System-theoretical and Empirical Modeling of Cultural, Political, and Socioeconomic Factors Structuring the Patterns of Internal Conflicts in Asia and Oceania" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the ISA's 49th ANNUAL CONVENTION, BRIDGING MULTIPLE DIVIDES, Hilton San Francisco, SAN FRANCISCO, CA, USA Online <APPLICATION/PDF>. 2008-10-08 from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p254309_index.html

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript Abstract: In the field of quantitative studies of the causal relations between ethnic constellations, cultural value patterns, and internal (i.e. intra-state) conflicts several lacunae exist. One particularly important concerns the methodical linking of empirical conflict data with modern conflict theories. On the one hand, empirical analysis is often not guided by theory. If theories play a part, they represent rather inductive ad hoc explanations or solutions to empirical puzzles. A research approach which has been deductively deduced from and systematically integrated into a sociological macro theory would therefore be desirable.On the other hand, theories of internal conflicts are frequently adherent to the rational choice paradigm. In order to complement the dominant, actor-centered approach, it therefore seems appropriate to search for a radically systemic theory of conflict. Existing approaches in this respect, however, either assume conflicts to be a sign of dysfunctionality - as Talcott Parsons did - or they are not useful for empirical analysis - like Niklas Luhmann's notion of conflict. The proposed paper will try to resolve some of the extant deficits by developing a theoretical model of conflict in societal systems, followed by an exemplary application of this model to the empirical situation in Asia and Oceania.On the basis of the concept of autopoietic, self-referential social systems according to Luhmann, it is possible to tie in other system-theoretical approaches into our considerations. First to be mentioned (1) is a combination of the classical principle of holarchic structures, involving suprasystems and subsystems, with the principle of holonomic structures according to David Bohm and Karl Pribram, dealing with implicate order. In addition to establishing political and socioeconomic subsystems, this procedure also allows for an entirely new approach regarding the conception of culture as the whole of the societal system being implicitly present in its parts, and thus for a well-defined localization of ethnic, religio-linguistic factors, as well.Furthermore (2), transferring the notion of dissipative systems into the context of social systems has turned out to be of considerable value for the model, which we developed to ascertain the causal links between a country's strain due to conflict and structural context factors. Dissipative systems are those which maintain their self-organized structures by emitting into their environments their inner entropy - i.e. the "mess of disorder" that has been accumulated due to the increase of their self-complexity. We assume that in societal systems this self-complexity increases because of the occurrence of conflicts. What we understand by the term of conflict is a potential state of the societal system, involving a divergence from political, socioeconomic or cultural norms inherent in the societal system. The entropy being produced by this can be exported from the emergent societal system to the underlying systems of interpersonal communication. In these social systems, then, is the approaching "low-grade" energy being autopoietically constituted in the form of physical violence as a mode of communication.Finally (3), the term of "attractor"� deriving from the natural sciences, is very central for the model advanced here. An attractor is an "attractive" state for a system. Applied to conflict as a system's state this means that a conflict attractor is a location in the state space where the occurrence of conflict is probable. The dimensions of the societal state space are shaped by ethnic, political, and socioeconomic factors.The model outlined here is intended to be a frame of analysis for empirical explorations. For this purpose, the quantitative data on political conflicts from the Heidelberg database of the Conflict Information System (CONIS) have been available. The important feature of CONIS of representing conflict dynamics as a sequence of phases of varying conflict intensities permits to assess the strain on each country due to conflict. The trajectory of each societal system thus created can shed some light on the causal relationship between the "conflict burden"� and the aforementioned factors. These factors have been operationalized by employing the respective POLITY IV data (political dimension), several indicators of social and economic development (socioeconomic dimension), and information regarding a country's religious and linguistic diversity (ethnic dimension).The proposed paper will accordingly be able to offer an analysis of internal conflicts in Asia and Oceania from 1945 to 2005, in order to illustratively answer the questions regarding the structural, in particular ethnic, influencing factors and enabling conditions for the occurrence of political conflicts. In terms of sheer quantity, the region is a focal point in today's global landscape of conflict. In 2006, 75 out 90 conflicts were qualified as "internal", showing quite plainly the present dominance of internal conflicts. Of these, 53 focussed on ethnic and / or religious issues. Tentative results from the model being applied to the data employed include the finding that ethnic diversity clearly increases the cumulative conflict burden of Asia's and Oceania's countries. It has a generally negative effect on the degree of human development, as well. With regard to the level of democracy, however, the results are not this clear-cut: Countries with a very low or a very high degree of ethnic diversity exhibit an apparent tendency towards the democratic regime type, whereas nations of medium diversity seem to be more prone to autocratic tendencies. Quite astonishing is the result that the conflict burden is highest in countries dominated by the Buddhist religion, followed by countries dominated by the Christian religion. Hinduist and Muslim nations, in contrast, range on the lower ranks when the strain exerted on a country by internal conflicts is concerned.

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