Virtual Pakistan 2013: An Agent-based Modeling Analysis

This thesis suggests that agent-based modeling provides an effective way to understand and analyze the internal political dynamics of Pakistan. The first section describes Pakistan’s current situation and introduces a study published by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) outlining five possible futures the nation could experience. After stating the five futures, I hypothesize that agent-based modeling could enhance this study and provide arguments that social scientists use to justify this quantitative approach. The next portion of the thesis intricately describes all aspects of the model-building process. The experimentation process and metrics are then discussed and finally, the experiment results are compared with the CFR study on Pakistan. The thesis concludes that agent-based modeling provides a complementary, systematic and logical way to examine nations’ political futures. Rather than forecasting, agent-based models provide researchers with a palette of possible trajectories.