Approximately 60 students participated in the sixth annual Field Exercise in Peace and Stability Operations (FieldEx) simulation, which took place in a Weare, N.H., paintball field last weekend.
The simulation initiative, led by the undergraduate student group Alliance Linking Leaders in Education and the Services (ALLIES), explored religious and ethnic conflict in an imaginary multi-ethnic, post-colonial nation, according to Shan ZhiThia, one of the event organizers.
According to the FieldEx event page, Tufts and non-Tufts students paid $10 or $15, respectively, to register and take part in the simulation.
Participants included students from Tufts and Wellesley College, as well as four advisors with real-world experience who helped students take realistic approaches to the scenario, Thia, a junior, said.
"There was someone from the U.S. army military intelligence to work with the peacekeeping group, ... a history graduate student to advise civilians and work with the religious leaders, et cetera," Thia said.
This year's simulation was modeled after a number of current conflicts in the world, including the situations in Rwanda, Myanmar, Syria, Mali and Northern Ireland, according to Michael Marks, who co-directed the event.
"We decided on a fictional country with two ethnic groups - a majority and minority," Marks, a senior, explained. "The majority has control of all the levels of government and society ... and the minority group is disenfranchised and oppressed. We also added religion in as a factor, so the majority group was heavily religious and the minority group quite secular."
This year's simulation was broader than last year's, which was specifically based on the Brazilian government's decision to displace people living in favelas for the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Summer Olympics, Marks explained.
The planning group for FieldEx, which consisted of 10 committee members, developed the conflict scenario together and wrote out roles for the simulation participants, according to Marks. These roles included politicians, international peacekeeping forces, members of extremist factions and monks, Roland Gillah, another one of the event organizers, said.
Participants of the simulation were encouraged to immerse themselves in their roles, understanding what their motivations would be and how they would approach the situations, according to Gillah, a sophomore.
"Students read and memorize [the role packets] and become the character required for each of these roles," he said. "One of my friends said a really good quote about this before: 'Cover [the role assignment] isn't something that you act; cover is something that you are.'"
The event began on Friday night, when the participants arrived at the New Hampshire campsite, Marks said.
"On the bus, they had all been handed a folder with their role biography and a brief background on the target country," he said. "After dinner at the campsite, we had them all split up into separate groups and strategize about the next day's simulation ... so it was a preview - an appetizer to the actual simulation."
The actual simulation on Saturday was divided into three sections, or moves, each about an hour long, according to Marks.
Between the moves, journalists reported on what was happening among the different players in the scenario, Marks said.
This year's simulation ended about 20 minutes early because the students negotiated a settlement, Thia said.
"I think [the simulation] stayed very realistic to the roles we had written and there was nothing too outlandish," Thia said. "It happened as if it was a real-world situation and this year, the simulation ended in a negotiated settlement, which was a big plus for us and really validated the experience."
One thing that the organizers of the event had been careful to avoid was allowing college students to use the opportunity to attack each other with paintball guns instead of staying true to the situation, according to Gillah.
"Not everyone gets a paintball gun - and once you give people a gun, they'll want to shoot it," he said. "We wanted to create a situation where they are dis-incentivized from having it become a paintball match."
Ultimately, the simulation was successful in doing that, since it ended in negotiated talks, according to Marks.
"The whole reason we have FieldEx is for students to really implement the policies and see how these actors should get involved," Thia said. "Putting people in different roles and seeing how they react, and comparing and contrasting their experiences to understand that -that is reflective of how real-world actors feel."
Thia explained that planning for the simulation began in September of last year. Organizers spent a long time creating a team and developing a conflict model, and he said the event was overall, a success.
"Something to highlight is that ... someone on our committee wrote an entire bible - 25 pages - for their religion," Marks said. "That's the kind of commitment that we had in this. ... It speaks to the passion of the students in FieldEx, ALLIES and in Tufts at large, which is very gratifying."
