Games and board games have often helped thinking strategically about war. For instance, Kriegspiel, a war game and variant of chess, was utilised by Prussian officers to (successfully) think through strategies and tactics to defeat the French army in the 18070-1871 war. But if board games have often been used to test battles on tables, simulation could also be used to think through peace building and reconstruction. Here students of the Peacebuilding class at McGill University attempt to reconstruct Afghanistan.
DM
Recently, students from my POLI 450 (Peacebuilding) class played a modified version of the Afghan Provincial Reconstruction game. The game itself is quite abstract, and shouldn’t be seen as modelling Afghanistan with any granularity or fidelity—as you’ll see below, simulated Afghanistan (unlike the real version) turned out to be a glowing success story, almost a Singapore of Central Asia. In this regard, the whole thing was a bit of an idyllic COIN clear-hold-build fantasy, and I need to tweak the game more to make it harder.
However, the real point of the exercise was to examine the challenge of coordination across multiple actors (Afghan government, NATO, international NGOs)., and for that purpose it served very well. In the original version, the impact of the Taliban is depicted purely through random event cards; in the modified version they are represented by an active team.
The account below (and several of the photographs) are provided by one…
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Ludic Geopolitics 