Conflict continuum

A conflict continuum is a model or concept various social science researchers use when modeling conflict on a continuum from low to high-intensity, such as from aggression to irritation to explosiveness. The mathematical model of game theory originally posited only a winner and a loser (a zero-sum game) in a conflict, but was extended to cooperation (a win-win situation and a non-zero sum game), and lets users specify any point between cooperation, peace, rivalry, contest, crisis, and conflict among stakeholders. By the decade of the 2010s, military planners realized that additional capabilities in communications, sensors and weapons countermeasures made it possible for competitors to react to a contestant's moves in the "gray zone" just short of conflict. In 2018 Kelly McCoy identified a continuum within competition itself, as explored in the United States Joint Staff's Joint Concept for Integrated Campaigning (JCIC), up to the point just short of armed conflict, while noting Perkins' connection to deterrence in the continuum. In 2020, Donald Stoker and Craig Whiteside cautioned that for strategists, the "gray zone" must not blur peace and war; they offered an analysis of the need for strategists to clearly distinguish peace, competition, contest, conflict, and war. Standoff is the condition of deadlock between antagonists, sometimes measured by the distance between them (standoff distance). For n antagonists in a non-zero sum game, von Neumann and Morgenstern showed in 1944 that this condition is equivalent to a zero-sum game with n+1 antagonists, where the n+1st player ("the fictitious player") is not an entity. Rather the fictitious player represents the global profit (or loss) of the n players in the non-zero sum game. If we reduce this game to a zero-sum 3-player game by the introduction of a fictitious player 3, then the characteristic function becomes the one given In Tibor Scitovsky's terminology (more commonly known as the Kaldor–Hicks criterion), this global profit (or loss) of the n+1st player represents the amount that the gainers would have been prepared to pay to the losers (or, in a global loss, the global amount that the n players have lost in total), in order to attain a desired global policy.