An Agent-Based Modeling Approach to Peacebuilding: Simulating Lederach's Pyramid in the Context of the Ambazonia Crisis

The Anglophone–Francophone conflict in Cameroon represents a protracted identity-based confrontation rooted in post-1972 state centralization, linguistic hierarchy, and the gradual erosion of Anglophone institutional autonomy. Rather than treating the crisis solely as a secessionist insurgency, this study conceptualizes it as a conflict transformation problem shaped by competing constructions of legitimacy, recognition, and political belonging. Drawing on John Paul Lederach’s three-level peacebuilding pyramid, the article develops an agent-based simulation model to examine how cross-level leadership interaction influences peace trajectories in the Ambazonia conflict. Eleven actors are categorized across grassroots, middle-range, and top-level leadership and evaluated through six coded indicators capturing political, military, diplomatic, economic, and ideological attributes. Six alternative geopolitical and institutional scenarios are simulated over 50 time steps. Leadership structure and interaction patterns function as independent variables, while actor-specific peace contribution scores constitute the dependent variable. The findings consistently demonstrate that structured cross-level engagement and coordinated top-level diplomatic leverage significantly increase aggregate peace indices compared to scenarios characterized by international disengagement or unilateral militarization. The study contributes methodologically by operationalizing Lederach’s relational peacebuilding framework within a transparent computational architecture, offering a theory-driven platform for comparative scenario analysis in protracted identity conflicts.