Zombie Sim!
By One of the upsides of my job is the virtually unfettered ability to conscript policy-oriented graduate students into goofy projects based on my idiosyncratic interests. In the past, of course, we’ve run simulations based on alien attacks, rage pandemics, a Godzilla incursion, and the institutional difficulties associated with the political inclusion of vampire-Americans. The point has always been to give groups of students with limited access to information incentive to produce policy product in an very (two hours) short time.
This year, in service of an ISA panel on Dan Drezner’s new zombie book, we returned to the living dead. I left the concept fairly vague; a zombie outbreak over the previous two years had devastated the Eurasian continent and North America before the major power finally brought it under control. Unfortunately, the remaining undefeated zombie hordes were now in the process of mutating from “slow” zombies into “fast” zombies. The class was divided into seven teams, including Russia, China, the United States, Japan, Nigeria, Al Qaeda, and Wikileaks. China and the United States had been badly mauled, having ceded substantial territory to the living dead but retaining territorial cores. Nigeria and Japan had survived largely untouched. Russia’s failed pursuit of a Redeker Plan had left it with only very limited territorial control, although a government in exile survived. The zombie apocalypse had not changed the basic mission sets of either Al Qaeda or Wikileaks. The assignment for each team was to develop a basic plan for dealing with the fast zombie mutation.
Although I hadn’t quite expected it to work out this way, a divide developed between the states and the NGOs. The states were pretty reluctant to compete with one another; not even baiting a confrontation with a resurgent Taiwan could produce tensions between the US, Japan, and China. With the partial exception of Russia, all of the teams were pretty hostile to the NGOs, with the US and the PRC opening a collaborative effort to shut down Wikileaks. Al Qaeda wasn’t particularly interested in making any contribution to the other teams, and embraced the zombie apocalypse as divine intervention in the War on Terror (“The zombie apocalypse is the best thing to happen for jihad since the internet”). The simulation didn’t really last long enough to allow Wikileaks to have much effect, which is a shame because most anti-zombie strategies require considerable governmental secrecy. Any effort at biological research into a zombie virus has queasy ethical implications, just as the Redeker Plan requires wholesale deception of large portions of the surviving human populations.
Russia was an interesting case. I had left open the possibility that Russia might develop into a post-territorial state; a governmental apparatus that still enjoyed the loyalty of some citizens, as well as limited ability to coerce and provide services. The Russian team didn’t quite jump to the bait, however, instead preferring to try Redeker again by establishing a government on Kamchatka. None of the other teams made much of an effort to take advantage of Russian weakness, although the Nigerians made a point of rejecting Russian entreaties to accept refugees.
And so what did we learn from this wildly unrepresentative, poorly constructed sim? Well, the results didn’t exactly support realist expectations. The nation-states didn’t express much interest in taking advantage of one another, instead concentrating on the provision of collective goods (zombie fighting, but also the resumption of international trade) preoccupied the state actors. The state actors also consistently resented the influence of NGOs, although this might have played out differently if I’d used a “benevolent,” pro-state NGO. I think that there are some forms of identity theory that could explain this; the states were uninterested in competing against each other in the presence of the “other,” in this case represented both by the zombies and the NGOs. The Concert of Europe, in which states set aside some methods of dispute resolution for fear of domestic revolutionaries, would be an example of this phenomenon. The Russian situation provided very mild support for this, as relations between the Russians and the other state actors were relatively cool. If points of dispute (say, large Russian refugee populations) had been included, we might have seen more exclusion of Russia from the identity category “state.”
Most importantly, the simulation made clear the necessity of additional research into zombie affairs. We’ll see what I can subject next year’s class to…