Related papers: Step by Step to Peace in Syria
Ethnic achievement gaps are often explained in terms of student and school factors. The decomposition of these gaps into their within- and between-school components has therefore been applied as a strategy to quantify the overall influence…
Cybersecurity challenges and the need for awareness are well-recognized in developed countries, but this still needs attention in less-developed countries. With the expansion of technology, security concerns are also becoming more prevalent…
I study how political bias and audience costs impose domestic institutional constraints that affect states' capacity to reach peaceful agreements during crises. With a mechanism design approach, I show that the existence of peaceful…
We consider a stochastic SIS infection model for a population partitioned into $m$ households assuming random mixing. We solve the model in the limit $m \to \infty$ by using the self-consistent field method of statistical physics. We derive…
The use of special operations forces (SOF) in war fighting and peace keeping efforts has increased dramatically in recent decades. A scientific understanding of the reason for this increase would provide guidance as to the contexts in which…
Detecting and mapping informal settlements encompasses several of the United Nations sustainable development goals. This is because informal settlements are home to the most socially and economically vulnerable people on the planet. Thus,…
The deterrent effect of military alliances is well documented and widely accepted. However, such work has typically assumed that alliances are exogenous. This is problematic as alliances may simultaneously influence the probability of…
A major public health concern in the United States (US) is gun-related deaths. The number of gun injuries largely varies spatially because of county-wise heterogeneity of race, sex, age, and income distributions. But still, a major…
Cities generate gains from interaction, but citizens often experience segregation as they move around the urban environment. Using GPS location data, we identify four distinct patterns of experienced segregation across US cities. Most…
We study the severity of conflict-related violence in Colombia at an unprecedented granular scale in space and across time. Splitting the data into different geographical regions and different historically-relevant eras, we uncover…
Living groups move in complex environments and are constantly subject to external stimuli, predatory attacks and disturbances. An efficient response to such perturbations is vital to maintain the group's coherence and cohesion.…
Despite a growing recognition of the importance of insurgent group structure on conflict outcomes, there is very little empirical research thereon. Though this problem is rooted in the inaccessibility of data on militant group structure,…
An alternative voting scheme is proposed to fill the democratic gap between a president elected democratically via universal suffrage (deterministic outcome, the actual majority decides), and a president elected by one person randomly…
The shape of urban settlements plays a fundamental role in their sustainable planning. Properly defining the boundaries of cities is challenging and remains an open problem in the Science of Cities. Here, we propose a worldwide model to…
We study SIS epidemic spreading models under population dispersal on multi-layer networks. We consider a patchy environment in which each patch comprises individuals belonging to different classes. Individuals disperse to other patches on a…
Robots sometimes have to work together with a mixture of partially-aligned or conflicting goals. Flocking - coordinated motion through cohesion, alignment, and separation - traditionally assumes uniform desired inter-agent distances. Many…
In this work, we formulate the problem of team formation amidst conflicts. The goal is to assign individuals to tasks, with given capacities, taking into account individuals' task preferences and the conflicts between them. Using dependent…
Urban land growth presents a major sustainability challenge, yet its growth patterns and dynamics remain unclear. We quantified urban land evolution by analyzing its statistical distribution in 14 regions and countries over 29 years. The…
Collective violence in direct confrontations between two opposing groups happens in short bursts wherein small subgroups briefly attack small numbers of opponents, while the others form a non-fighting audience. The mechanism is fighters'…
Despite modest declines in residential segregation levels since the Civil Rights Era, segregation remains a defining feature of the U.S. landscape. This study highlights the importance of considering physical barriers--features of the urban…