Context informed cross cultural collaboration in stability and support operations

According to Paul Collier, former Director of the Development Research group at the World Bank, 53% of all "resolved" conflicts relapse within 5 years. Identity is generally at the heart of most conflicts, and identity oth individual and collective - is rooted in culture. Understanding and appreciation of the cultural identity of the parties to an emerging conflict is critical to both understanding and transforming that conflict. Unfortunately, the cultural nuances of many conflicts are overlooked when standard Western models of conflict resolution are applied. This paper describes recent research in this area conducted for the National Intelligence Community. This work was extended for use by the Nobel Appeal Foundation and applied in several real-world peacemaking situations. That work is now being extended to identify cultural "indicators and warnings" to activities or proposed activities within the peacekeeping process under a new effort funded by the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA). This environment provides a mechanism for the automatic ingestion of status information and news into a machine understandable "situation context". A community of agents does partial matching of the known situation context to two semantically linked classes of models within the system: mission-independent cultural models; and culturally-independent mission models. Mission and cultural indicators and warnings (I&Ws) results and visualized for the user to interpret and react.