Achieving Generational Peace in Mali through Intergenerational Mean-Field-Type Game-based Incentives

TL;DR

This paper models Mali's conflict ecosystem using an intergenerational mean-field-type game to identify incentives that can promote peace and reduce violence across generations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel intergenerational mean-field-type game framework to analyze conflict dynamics and design incentive mechanisms for peacebuilding in Mali.

Findings

Violence cycles persist due to retaliatory behaviors and trauma transmission.

Strategic exploitation by war entrepreneurs sustains conflict economies.

Incentive-compatible transfers can shift equilibrium toward peace.

Abstract

This article develops an intergenerational mean-field-type game (MFTG) to model Mali's and neighbouring countries multi-actor conflict ecosystem, which includes formal state forces, traditional hunters, nonstate militias, jihadists, criminal networks, civil societies, and international proxies. Each decision-maker (agent, a group of agents or representative agent) is defined by a type, state, information structure, and action, with payoffs dependent not only on individual decisions but also on the evolving distribution of all agents' profiles. The model reveals that cycles of violence can persist across multiple generations due to the embedded presence of retaliatory types such as revenger child-soldiers whose trauma-conditioned best-responses favor conflict, and whose behavior reinforces intergenerational transmission of violence. The model also captures the strategic exploitation of institutional fragility by war entrepreneurs who profit from sustained instability through arms sales, militia contracting, and unregistered market mediation. These actors inject minimal resources to trigger profitable escalations, turning latent tensions into self-reinforcing violence economies. We show that in the absence of structural counterincentives, peaceful strategies are non-absorbing, and violence remains dynamically rewarding for war entrepreneurs. However, by embedding incentive-compatible, information-adaptive transfers directly into instantaneous payoffs, rewarding verifiable peacebuilding and penalizing aggression, it is possible to shift the mean-field-type equilibrium distribution intergenerationally toward more peaceful types and drive systemic de-escalation. We also discuss about the funding and the real implementation of such mechanisms in the field.