Related papers: On the frequency and severity of interstate wars
Although very large wars remain an enduring threat in global politics, we lack a clear understanding of how some wars become large and costly, while most do not. There are three possibilities: large conflicts start with and maintain intense…
The severity of war, measured by battle deaths, follows a power-law distribution. Here, we demonstrate that power law also holds in the temporal aspects of interstate conflicts. A critical quantity is the inter-conflict interval (ICI), the…
We analyze the database prepared by Brecke (Brecke 2011) for violent conflict, covering some 600 years of human history. After normalizing the data for the global human population, we find that the number of casualties tends to follow a…
With climate change accelerating, the frequency of climate disasters is expected to increase in the decades to come. There is ongoing debate as to how different climatic regions will be affected by such an acceleration. In this paper, we…
In the spirit of Richardson's original (1948) study of the statistics of deadly conflicts, we study the frequency and severity of terrorist attacks worldwide since 1968. We show that these events are uniformly characterized by the…
In many complex systems studied in statistical physics, inter-arrival times between events such as solar flares, trades and neuron voltages follow a heavy-tailed distribution. The set of event times is fractal-like, being dense in some time…
We study the statistics of human deaths from wars, conflicts, similar man-made conflicts as well as natural disasters. The probability distribution of number of people killed in natural disasters as well as man made situations show power…
Even before 9/11 there were claims that the nature of war had changed fundamentally. The 9/11 attacks created an urgent need to understand contemporary wars and their relationship to older conventional and terrorist wars, both of which…
Human flourishing is often severely limited by persistent violence. Quantitative conflict research has found common temporal and other statistical patterns in warfare, but very little is understood about its general spatial patterns. While…
It appeared recently that the underlying degree distribution of networks may play a crucial role concerning their robustness. Empiric and analytic results have been obtained, based on asymptotic and mean-field approximations. Previous work…
The complexity of armed conflicts is expressed in the number of fatalities that may span several orders of magnitude. This study presents a minimalist, physics-informed approach to estimating the likelihood of extreme conflict fatalities at…
The Correlates of War project scrupulously collects information about disputes between the countries over a long historical period together with other data relevant to the character and reasons of international conflicts. Using methods of…
I present a unified discussion of several recently published results concerning the escalation, timing and severity of violent events in human conflicts and global terrorism, and set them in the wider context of real-world and cyber-based…
We examine statistical pictures of violent conflicts over the last 2000 years, finding techniques for dealing with incompleteness and unreliability of historical data. We introduce a novel approach to apply extreme value theory to…
We report a remarkable universality in the patterns of violence arising in three high-profile ongoing wars, and in global terrorism. Our results suggest that these quite different conflict arenas currently feature a common type of enemy,…
We focus on the statistics of word occurrences and of the waiting times between such occurrences in Blogs. Due to the heterogeneity of words' frequencies, the empirical analysis is performed by studying classes of "frequently-equivalent"…
We identify robust statistical patterns in the frequency and severity of violent attacks by terrorist organizations as they grow and age. Using group-level static and dynamic analyses of terrorist events worldwide from 1968-2008 and a…
Quantitative understanding of human behaviors provides elementary comprehension of the complexity of many human-initiated systems. A basic assumption embedded in the previous analyses on human dynamics is that its temporal statistics are…
In this paper we study the iterated birth process of which we examine the first-passage time distributions and the hitting probabilities. Furthermore, linear birth processes, linear and sublinear death processes at Poisson times are…
The causal mechanism between climate and political violence is fraught with complex mechanisms. Current quantitative causal models rely on one or more assumptions: (1) the climate drivers persistently generate conflict, (2) the causal…