THE LANGUAGE OF CONFLICT INTELLIGENCE
The Tacitus Ontology is a structural language for conflict. It converts messy reality into a legible system of actors, interests, and constraints—underpinning our ability to monitor disputes, map polarization, and generate resolution pathways instead of just static reports.
THE RESOLUTION DEFICIT AND CONFLICT ONTOLOGY
STRUCTURAL PROBLEMContemporary life runs on an ever-expanding data-surface: email threads, chats, documents, community meetings and narratives that multiply faster than any human or organizational structure can interpret. The volume, velocity, and heterogeneity of these signals outpace our cognitive bandwidth, producing a widening Resolution Deficit—we register far more friction than we can meaningfully process.
Tacitus◳ approaches this not as chaos but as computable structure. By treating conflict as a system of interacting variables—actors, incentives, narratives, emotions, temporal shifts—it reveals the underlying geometry that raw information hides. When the structure becomes visible, the path to de-escalation and resolution emerges, whether the setting is a school-board dispute or a geopolitical negotiation.
Updating live as new signals arrive, rather than freezing in episodic PDF reports.
From monitoring polarization to designing specific guarantees that unlock agreement.
CIRCUITS OF POWER
SYSTEMIC MODELTacitus sits at the intersection of systems thinking (Norbert Wiener, David Easton), strategic interaction (Thomas Schelling, John Nash, Robert Putnam), and institutional analysis (Elinor Ostrom, George Tsebelis). It assumes outcomes emerge from the geometry of constraints, not just the psychology of leaders.
However, true resolution requires more than game theory. Our understanding is deeply informed by the Concordia Discors ethos—honoring pluralism, individual agency, and the complexity of human relations.
We draw on Hannah Arendt to understand the public sphere as a space of freedom; Isaiah Berlin to navigate deep value pluralism without coercion; and Jürgen Habermas to structure deliberation that is communicative rather than merely strategic.
We integrate John Burton and Herbert Kelman’s human needs theory—recognizing that identity, dignity, and security are non-negotiable—alongside Fisher & Ury’s principled negotiation and Jon Elster’s insights on social mechanisms. This synthesis ensures Tacitus models conflict not just as a mechanical graph of incentives, but as a human system defined by moral agents. Our understanding of conflict is modeled via these six structural roles:
Incumbents
Actors occupying the center: executives, ruling coalitions, dominant factions. Anchored in survival logic, defending the status quo infrastructure.
Challengers
Reformers, opposition blocs, insurgent teams. They seek to rearrange the topology of power, often with higher risk tolerance.
Veto Players
Any actor whose consent is required to change the status quo. Their distance and cohesion determine if change is possible or impossible.
Selectorates
The broad constituency (S) and the smaller winning coalition (W) essential for survival. Tacitus tracks if these coalitions are stable or brittle.
Kinetic & Discursive
Conflict unfolds on two planes: physical capability (Kinetic) and narrative legitimacy (Discursive). Shocks in one reprice risk in the other.
Win-Set Geometry
The mathematical intersection of outcomes acceptable to all decisive veto players. When this shrinks, pre-conflict begins.
MEASURING THE INVISIBLE
QUANTIFIED FRICTIONCapacity to force or block change: authority, chokepoints, or agenda control.
Exposure to adverse outcomes: reputational collapse, sanctions, or internal splits.
Internal alignment. Fragmented actors have high friction and cannot make credible promises.
The derivative of tension. Is the dispute stabilizing or hardening into identity conflict?
HOW INFLUENCE FLOWS
RELATIONAL EDGES>> HARD POWER VECTORS
- VETO Legal or procedural kill switch. Highest value edge; overuse signals sclerosis.
- CONFLICT Strikes, lawsuits, kinetic force. Bargaining collapses into damage.
- FUNDING Control of capital flows. Determines which projects survive.
- DEPENDENCY Structural reliance on energy, data, or logistics. Often invisible until it fails.
>> SOFT POWER VECTORS
- NARRATIVE Stories that confer legitimacy. Decides which losses are tolerable.
- PRESSURE Boycotts and campaigns that raise the cost of inaction.
- ALLIANCE Pacts aggregating power. Can create escalation tripwires.
- MEDIATION CHANNEL Pathways where trust allows for reframing without public cost.
PERIODIC TABLE OF CONFLICT ACTORS
NODE TYPESConflicts emerge from the interaction of different actor families. Tacitus maps these roles so analysis is portable across cases.
1. Governance & Authority
2. Capital & Infrastructure
3. Coercive & Disruptive
TACITUS LAB: AI & DEMOCRACY
EXPERIMENTALTacitus Lab explores how AI-mediated deliberation and constitutional AI can support better collective decisions without replacing human judgment.
We are prototyping tools for parliaments and boards to run "what-if" deliberations, detecting where minority viewpoints are sidelined and generating agenda-setting questions that widen the conversation.
>> CURRENT EXPERIMENTS
- Deliberative AI Summarizing arguments to surface hidden consensus.
- Constitutional Agents AI constrained by normative rules, not opaque prompts.
- Subsidiarity Engines Giving decision power back to the local level.
Concordia Discors ◬
The editorial counterpart to Tacitus. A long-form space for essays on liberty, conscience, and the politics of polarization.
Where Tacitus encodes conflicts into structures, Concordia Discors dwells on meaning: how people form convictions and what it means to defend freedom under pressure.
Read the Magazine"Polarization as Spiritual Fracture"
"The Architecture of Disagreement"
>> Run Your Conflict Through Tacitus
We build a live conflict graph for your organization and extract the resolution path.
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