The Geography of Conflict Diamonds: The Case of Sierra Leone 1.1.0
In the early 1990s, Sierra Leone entered into nearly 10 years of civil war. The ease of accessibility to the country’s diamonds is said to have provided the funding needed to sustain the insurgency over the years. According to Le Billon, the spatial dispersion of a resource is a major defining feature of a war. Using geographic information systems to create a realistic landscape and theory to ground agent behavior, an agent-based model is developed to explore Le Billon’s claim. An ABM is integrated with geographic information systems (GIS) for this purpose. This is an exploratory model and was thus developed for researchers and students interested in agent-based modeling, specifically the role of geography in conflict.
