The Mershon Center,
Prediction and the Middle East Peace Process,
February 14-15, 1997.

Steven Weber, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
Janice Gross Stein, University of Toronto

Summary

The recent election of Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister of Israel throws into flux the Middle Eastern peace process. What several months ago seemed to many observers the almost inevitable "working out" of a decades-long conflict that had gradually become unsustainable on all sides, is now seen more clearly as part of a contingent unfolding set of events which could drive the region in more than one direction, including backwards toward explicit conflict and even war. This presents unique theoretical, analytic, and policy opportunities.

Our project will bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to develop scenarios for the future of the Middle East peace process. In a theoretically disciplined fashion, we will try to identify the most important and most uncertain driving forces operating in this situation, and use these to generate a set of conditional forecasts for the region. These forecasts will be updated and critiqued at regular intervals -- every 6 months, for a period of 3 years.

The projects' results will be valuable to IR theorists, who generally seek to understand what are the most critical driving forces behind events with complex conjunctural causality, but usually do so in a post-dictive setting, when they already know the outcome. IR theorists rarely go on the record in a predictive fashion with their arguments. The project will provide insight into whether and how formal models of several kinds add value to predictions based on "informal" theory-based argument. The project's results will also be valuable to policy makers, by alerting them to possibilities they may not have considered, and to connections between causes and feasible points of intervention that were not so clear to start.

I. Project Objectives

The return of the Likud Party to power in Israel in May 1996, through a hotly contested election in which Netanyahu won by less than 1% of the vote, brought dramatic shifts in the immediate stance of the Israeli government toward its Arab neighbors and the on-going peace process in the Middle East. It also provoked discussion about some very old "theories" in politics and history, as well as some newer perspectives. The question is, how do theorists (and policy makers) understand the causal significance of this shift?

We use Israeli foreign policy as a window into theoretical debates about the major determinants of substantial transformations within international conflict and cooperation. (this is only one window, and it is for analytical convenience only, as a way to start). Some perspectives view the individual decision maker as a key cause. Other perspectives stress more strongly particular aspects of the environment within which decision makers operate. No matter his individual preferences for action, Netanyahu is constrained by a set of domestic political forces (party politics, political economy, religious beliefs, ongoing changes in the nature and preferences of the Israeli electorate, etc.) to which he must respond in (at most) the medium term. Or, for IR scholars, by a set of international forces (the balance of power in the region, US preferences and pressure on Israel, etc.) that would be expected to delimit and condition strongly the group of choices open to the government.

For each of these perspectives there is an intriguing methodological challenge. Is it possible to develop predictive arguments of some kind, that go on the record before events have transpired? Or are these perspectives only useful for post-diction, or explanation of events that have already occurred (and if so, what does that imply about their status as scientific theories). These questions overlap with recent work on counterfactual reasoning in world politics (in which both Stein and Weber, as well as Lebow, Herrman, Tetlock, and other possible participants, were involved) as well as important questions that arose in that earlier project about the logical differences -- if there are any -- between forward and backward reasoning in time. It is also relevant to psychological studies of how people actually do think predictively, whether social science is better at that task than "layman reasoning", and whether prediction and error-correction is a practicable means of encouraging learning from history for both theorists and policy makers. Finally there is the question of whether formal models add value to predictive arguments, and if they do so in a way that is similar to or different from what they do in the explanation of past historical events.

The project organizers share an additional concern about IR theory, to which we feel this exercise will contribute. It is to re-insert a sensible notion of contingency into theoretical arguments which have tended to take on a deterministic flavor, that we feel is unjustified in the light of history's causal complexity. Unfortunately (in our view), the field of international relations tends to privilege arguments that reach back into past cases and parse out one, or at most two, independent variables that are then stressed as the major driving forces behind events. Since the field also favors independent variables that are "structural" or otherwise parametric, the endeavor tends to take on a bias toward over-deterministic explanations. This tendency is quite strong in respect to the Arab-Israeli conflict. What seemed almost unthinkable before it happened -- the Sadat trip to Jerusalem, or the Peres-Arafat moves toward peace -- are in retrospect said to be almost over-determined by big structural causes such as the loss of a major war or the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Yet the same theorists who feel comfortable with this perspective on the past would likely bristle at the thought that the future was equally deterministic. We hope that forcing theorists to project their arguments into future - time will also force them to re-evaluate their beliefs about what they think they know about causality in the past. The big goal would be to incorporate elements of contingency in a manner that would not be paralyzing to social science debate but would serve to open that debate to be more acceptable toward more complex and multi-variable explanations with a continuing sense of humility about how much we really have (and can have) explained.

For this reason, we do not propose to organize a forecasting "tournament" (analogous to Axelrod's Prisoner's Dilemma tournament) where advocates of different theoretical perspectives are asked essentially to generate differential predictions on a single dependent variable, in the hope of later finding winners and losers. Instead, we build on the understanding that different theoretical traditions in IR do not (in fact, need not) share the same dependent variables -- just as they do not share the same independent variables. For example, structural-realists might generate arguments about broad outcomes of the peace process and the future shape of the region, while having less to say about Israeli foreign policy in particular. A perspective stressing religion as a driving force might say more about the evolving preferences and policies events. of some major actors (not all of whom may be states). The payoff for the project comes in seeing how and when these different perspectives succeed in identifying key driving forces that contribute to outcomes of interest, and how and when dependent variables can be combined in complementary ways. We focus on the peace process, while recognizing that this is a function of strategic interaction between a set of major actors within and outside the region. The best way to answer a question like "does state power over-ride religious preferences and cultural predilections?" in a more subtle way than IR theorists typically do, is to allow proponents of each perspective to fully develop their arguments using their preferred independent and dependent variables -- and cooperate with each other in evaluating evidence as it comes in.

The project is clearly relevant to policy. Major actors (including but not limited to the US) are engaged in significant efforts to influence the peace process, but often do so without a clearly articulated and consistent understanding of what variables matter and how a particular intervention will operate. At a minimum, this project will alert policy makers to the implicit arguments upon which they are acting and illustrate for them in a constructive way some of the key uncertainties they should take account of. By providing alternative views and some unexpected possibilities, the project should challenge the "official future" that decision makers frequently carry around with them and use as the basis for making and evaluating policy. Generating early indicators (as we discuss below) is a particularly useful means of alerting policy makers to unfamiliar causal forces and trends that may be operating, and forcing these issues up the attention threshold earlier than otherwise might have been the case -- possibly avoiding detrimental surprises.

II. The Method

The project will bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, whose task will be to develop a set of scenarios for the possible future(s) of the Middle East peace process. A list of participants, potential and confirmed, is attached (we do not intend this list to be final and we would like to add others). The group will include general IR theorists, Middle East experts, decision-making specialists, modelers, and others. The idea is to gain some knowledgeable coverage of what we believe are the major causal forces now driving Israeli foreign policy. Naturally, we are prepared to expand the group as necessary to tap expertise in areas that come up as important causal forces that we have not yet identified. Although we do not anticipate including policy makers at the first stage of the project, we plan to invite policy makers from as many of the involved countries as possible to future meetings where they would be asked to evaluate and critique the scenarios, as well as help us to see what the group of scholars has produced that may surprise them or change their views of what is important and/or possible.

The "scenario methodology" has three main objectives. The first is to draw out underlying theoretically-driven assumptions about the major driving forces that impinge on events. The second is to develop and analyze interaction possibilities among those driving forces. The third is to organize that complexity into a small or moderate number of possible future scenarios. The scenarios then act as impressionistic pictures that combine in different combinations causal variables at different values. Scenarios are not, and are not intended to be "point predictions" of specific events. Rather, scenarios make the following kinds of claims: if the political economy of Israeli labor needs turns out to be a critical driving force, then we should start to see more of "X" kinds of things happening, and less of "Y" kinds of things. The creative part of the exercise comes in agreeing on what "X" and "Y" are, as well as on working out the means by which to evaluate the predictive "results" as future history becomes data. We believe that computational modeling (Sylvan, Taber) may be one sophisticated and helpful way to do this.

The scenario methodology has 7 steps: identify driving forces, specify predetermined elements, identify critical uncertainties, develop scenarios with clear "plot lines", extract early indicators for each scenario, consider the implications of each scenario, and develop "wild cards" that are not integral to major possibilities but could change the situation dramatically if they were to happen.

Driving forces are the causal elements that surround a problem, event, or decision. While some driving forces are likely to derive from standard independent variables in major social science theories, others are not -- for example, the importance of religion in the middle east region. It is common in developing explanations for past events to try to limit candidate causes or driving forces to just a few, or perhaps even two. In generating scenarios for the future, we hope to put on the table a longer list at least to start, and then to whittle down by re-organizing and grouping driving forces that belong together, as well as dropping (but only on a contingent basis) forces that participants feel will be less important causes.

Predetermined elements are things that are relatively certain, parameters that can safely be assumed for the scope and span of the scenario exercise. The difficult task comes in sorting out what is certain or very close to it, from what people simply think or believe. This is a terrifically important cognitive and theoretical exercise that is very useful in counteracting psychologically-based tendencies to treat routine events, "causes" of "effects", background actors, sins of omission, and "structural" (not human agency) causes as immutable. Yet the fact that there are no easy experiments and control situations in world politics does not mean that there do not exist things that are relatively certain. Four possible examples of the kinds of things that can be pre-determined within reasonable bounds in the Middle East are:

• slowly changing phenomena -- like demographics
• constrained situations -- like geography and water supplies
• "in the pipeline" -- a need for jobs among Palestinian youths coming of age
• inevitable collisions -- the status of East Jerusalem

Critical uncertainties develop in seeking out what is most uncertain and most important to a particular decision or to understanding a set of events. Critical uncertainties often derive out of a deeper understanding of driving forces, but sometimes are closely related to pre-determined elements particularly in the case where those elements create problems that must somehow be resolved. What is special about scenarios is that they put the critical uncertainties out in front, ahead of the plot lines or connecting principles that pull the story together. There is an important difference of emphasis here with standard social science theory "testing", where what is mutable and uncertain is often taken to be the "independent variables" suggested by connecting principles that we already know well. In scenaric thinking, plot lines have to work with the critical uncertainties rather than the other way around.

A scenario plot line is a story about how things happen. It describes how driving forces might plausibly behave as they interact with predetermined elements and different combinations of critical uncertainties. Plots have their own logic (or sometimes more than one logic) that drive the story forward and suggest the directions in which uncertainties resolve. The logics are sometimes quite familiar and may simply be elaborations of standard IR theory. For example, balance of power theory emphasizes the way in which a strong driving force (states' desire for independence and autonomy) interacts with predetermined elements (power configurations) and critical uncertainties (who will ally with whom) in an international system to produce outcomes. Sometimes new logics emerge. The advantage of the scenario method is that equifinality, multifinality, and complex conjunctural causation are no longer stubborn inconveniences that need to be minimized or simply ignored; instead they are treated as natural and fundamental aspects of reality. Unlike the ideal scientific notion of an explanation of the past, there will be several scenarios that result. That is not a weakness or a liability; it is the essence of the method. It is a way of capturing the probabilistic nature of our arguments without necessarily having to attach probability estimates to them (which we may not be in a position to do).

The question then becomes, how many alternative stories make up a good scenaric exercise. The answer derives from the social-psychological context in which scenario thinking (just like all social science) is embedded. There is no need to lay out anything like all the possible composites, and there is no presumption that any single scenario would turn out to be "right". The idea is to identify perhaps three or four significant stories that challenge conventional beliefs about what "must" be; that suggest different courses of action and consequences for the audience and the actors; and that are plausible enough to them that they will carry the stories around in their minds and look for signals of the dynamics the stories contain.

Early indicators link scenarios to "observable implications" that help a data collector or a participant evaluate, as history unfolds, which scenario (or which parts of scenarios) may be coming to pass. Developing early indicators is an exercise in "process-tracing", extrapolated into the future. We will impel participants to ask, if a particular set of driving forces were to become most important and lead to a given scenario, what would be some of the early indications that events were indeed unfolding along that particular path and not along another? The strategy is a modified version of the simple idea of increasing the number of observables that differentiate between one set of explanations and another. By doing so in future time, we reduce post-hoc determinism and force ourselves to confront in a creative way historical contingency.

Implications of scenarios are aimed explicitly at decision-making and action. One of the valuable consequences of thinking about historical contingency in a disciplined way, is that it forces people who are going to make decisions to ask what life would be like in more than one future world, and what they would do if they found themselves in a world different from the one they expect. They might also recognize the extent to which their own actions could be an important pivot or determinant of what kinds of futures were likely to evolve. Considering at once the behavioral implications of more than one scenario helps to clarify the stakes, risks, and uncertainties connected with any single course of action that an individual or a state might choose.

Finally, we would like to press our participants to develop a list of wild cards. These would be conceivable (if low probability) events or actions that might undermine or modify radically the presumed course of events. Some wild cards could constitute extreme values on a familiar independent variable; others might be entirely outside of the realm of standard social science arguments. In either case, doing this prospectively could change our views on what variables should be a part of theory, or what an "extreme" value really is -- since it avoids the possibility of post-hoc certainty. It would also be revealing if we were to miss entirely a wild card - type cause, or if wild cards happened but were "damped out" in their effects by other kinds of causes.

III. The Process and the Outputs

We propose a series of six meetings to be held over a period of three years. The first meeting would take two days, and would be the forum for the development of scenarios through the method outlined above. The second meeting, perhaps a day and a half, would be held 6 months later. This meeting would focus on the contributions of Middle East experts, who would be asked to critique the scenarios and add both unexamined variables and relevant specific data. At the third meeting, one year into the project, participants would start to evaluate incoming evidence; active observers would offer their views on the psychology and group dynamics of the process; modellers would present their thoughts on what contribution to scenario development or data evaluation they could make. Two additional one-day meetings at 6 month intervals would repeat the process of updating scenarios, evaluating evidence, and suggesting means (psychology, methodology, communication) by which to improve the process. A final meeting at approximately 3 years would wrap up the project. The question would be, what have we learned -- about the Middle East, about social science theory, about our abilities to think forward in time, about how to correct our biases and theoretical errors. An essential part of the process, probably following the first meeting and certainly thereafter, would be to have policy makers and participants in the unfolding events evaluate and critique the scenarios.

We envision three major written outputs. The first would be a series of "research notes", prepared at 6 month intervals after each of the workshop meetings. We would publish these as an on-going record of the project, its findings, and its self-critique, in a journal (Ben Frankel of The Journal of Strategic Studies has expressed interest). The idea here is to provide scholars with a documented history including modified arguments, falsified hypotheses and predictions, revised understandings of the importance of driving forces. We would aim also to produce a set of policy papers, to focus in on particular sets of policy-relevant issues that arise in the course of our discussions. The idea here is to capitalize early on by drawing in the interests of policy makers and offering something of use to them, just as we intend to use their knowledge to improve our social science. Finally, we would envision a scholarly book at the end of the project. This book would have two major foci: substantive findings concerning outcomes in the Middle East, and theoretical implications of what worked and what did not work in our efforts to shift from explanation of past events with known outcomes, to prediction of future events whose outcomes were not known to start.

IV. Participants

We propose a steering committee to lead the project. Members will include Janice Gross Stein, Steven Weber, and (from Mershon) Richard Ned Lebow and Richard Herrman. All four would, obviously, be central participants in the project as well, and are confirmed.

The project will start with a "core" group of participants, who will generate scenarios at the first meeting. The core will consist of representatives of diverse, powerful theoretical perspectives. Additional participants will be added later, to cover substantive and/or theoretical and methodological issues that arise over the course of the project. Obviously the number of participants we can invite depends in part on funding.

Additional possible participants in the "core" group include but are not limited to:

Stephen Brams
Philip Tetlock
Charles Taber
Randy Schweller
Donald Sylvan
Etel Solingen
Bruce Jentleson
Dalia Dassa Kaye
Micheal Barnett
Aaron Belkin
David Spiro
Stephen Walt
Shibley Telhami
Bill Quandt
Asher Arian

Possible Middle East Experts include:

Greg Gause
Laurie Brand
Nathan Brown
Saul Newman
Shaul Bakhash

We will identify and invite additional scholars with expertise in the areas of environment (particularly water issues); religion; political economy of labor in the region.

We will ask Alexander George to serve as a "senior reviewer" and advisor.

V. Preliminary Budget Calculations

We estimate a need for approximately $25,000 in the first year, to cover airfare and expenses for participants at the first two meetings, as well as administrative expenses for xeroxing, telephone and fax, etc., and some funds for the project organizers. At least one of these meetings will be held at the Mershon Center.

Funding for the remaining four meetings over the next two years will be sought elsewhere. Ben Frankel has expressed interest in contributing; additional possibilities include the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC); the Berkeley MacArthur Project on Multilateralism; United States Institute of Peace; major foundations; and others. The project organizers will seek to secure broad funding from a wide variety of sources.