Emergent regularities and scaling in armed conflict data
Physics and Society
2020-05-01 v4 Statistical Mechanics
Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems
Neurons and Cognition
Abstract
Armed conflict exhibits regularities beyond known power law distributions of fatalities and duration over varying culture and geography. We systematically cluster conflict reports from a database of events from Africa spanning 20 years into conflict avalanches. Conflict profiles collapse over a range of scales. Duration, diameter, extent, fatalities, and report totals satisfy mutually consistent scaling relations captured with a model combining geographic spread and local conflict-site growth. The emergence of such social scaling laws hints at principles guiding conflict evolution.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1903.07762,
title = {Emergent regularities and scaling in armed conflict data},
author = {Edward D. Lee and Bryan C. Daniels and Christopher R. Myers and David C. Krakauer and Jessica C. Flack},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.07762},
year = {2020}
}