Related papers: Emergent regularities and scaling in armed conflic…

Armed conflict data display scaling and universal dynamics in both social and physical properties like fatalities and geographic extent. We propose a randomly branching, armed-conflict model that relates multiple properties to one another…

Existing models of political violence often emphasize discrete transitions, when conflicts emerge, escalate, or subside, without considering the longer trajectories of violence that accumulate across time and space. This paper introduces a…

Conflicts, like many social processes, are related events that span multiple scales in time, from the instantaneous to multi-year developments, and in space, from one neighborhood to continents. Yet, there is little systematic work on…

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…

Modern armed conflicts have a tendency to cluster together and spread geographically. However, the geography of most conflicts remains under-studied. To fill this gap, this article presents a new indicator that measures two key geographical…

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 conflicts between armed groups often go on for years. The classical model of such conflicts accounts for the number of participants and for the technology level of the equipment of the groups. Below we extend this model in order to…

Conflict fatalities tend to follow heavy-tailed statistical distributions. A 2005 fusion-fission theory predicts mathematically that for armed groups operating in dynamically evolving clusters within a given conflict, the number of…

Timely and accurate conflict event data are essential for real-time monitoring, forecasting, and policy response. Yet near-real-time conflict datasets such as the Armed Conflict Location \& Event Data Project (ACLED) are subject to…

The frequency and magnitude of weather extreme events have increased significantly during the past few years in response to anthropogenic climate change. However, global statistical characteristics and underlying physical mechanisms are…

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…

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…

Civil unrest is a powerful form of collective human dynamics, which has led to major transitions of societies in modern history. The study of collective human dynamics, including collective aggression, has been the focus of much discussion…

Urban scaling theory posits that urban indicators follow power-law relations with population, yet the evolution of these patterns - and the role of regional differences in settings marked by social inequalities and unplanned urbanization -…

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…

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…

Are big conflicts different from small or medium size conflicts? To answer this question, we leverage fine-grained conflict data, which we map to climate, geography, infrastructure, economics, raw demographics, and demographic composition…

When a dangerous international crisis begins, leaders need to know whether their next move is going to resolve the dispute or amplify it out of control. Theories of conflict have mainly served to deepen the confusion, revealing fighting,…

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,…

Phase transitions, characterized by abrupt shifts between macroscopic patterns of organization, are ubiquitous in complex systems. Despite considerable research in the physical and natural sciences, the empirical study of this phenomenon in…