The United Nations and the Rationale for Collective Intelligence ...

with the UN system. Hence, it is possible to argue that the limitations of game theory have little to do with the model itself but much to do with the rigidity of its application in the analysis of international conflict. In a fluid environment, the tools of analysis would require frequent adjustment, given that a social or political setting could change, sometimes unpredictably.

Changes in the environment and subsequent adjustments need not affect the strength of a model. A model naturally aims to acknowledge both the historical and the present context of a concept. It aims to include a (total) definition of the physical environment, known or observable variables such as established patterns of behaviour among interacting agents, as well as those factors, past and present, that have contributed to shaping the system. From this point of view, a model is a set of assumptions that may be used to develop an argument.¹¹ A model is not an exact representation of an entity but an abstraction of reality. A model attempts to encapsulate and provide a simplified picture of a rather complex reality. This simple formulation can be achieved through, as Thomas Schelling puts it, a ‘precise and economical statement of a set of relationships that are sufficient to produce the phenomenon in question’.¹²

Horowitz defined the purpose of a model as a means of predicting and explaining behaviour.¹³ But a model may also serve to clarify one's information need, and hence, models may also serve as prognostic tools to identify faults and discrepancies in previously existing models. For example, a useful exercise would include, among other things, the exploration of how particular assumptions influence the implications of a model. In IR scholarship, many assumptions have evolved, especially in the Cold War years, to support the difficulty in fostering cooperation among states. The domination of very few models, especially the anarchy-oriented paradigms such as realists and the neoliberal theses, had, in essence, served as main obstacles in developing coherent and plausible alternative arguments in international political scholarship and, so too, in the study of collective intelligence. For robustness and rigour, many of these models are examined and where they are found to be wanting or restrictive are omitted or modified to enable the