Related papers: Jihad over Centuries
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…
This paper introduces new methods for studying the prevalence of terrorism around the world and over time. Our analysis treats spatial prevalence of terrorism, the changing profile of groups carrying out the acts of terrorism, and trends in…
Violence is commonly linked with large urban areas, and as a social phenomenon, it is presumed to scale super-linearly with population size. This study explores the hypothesis that smaller, isolated cities in Africa may experience a…
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…
The European colonization of sub-Saharan Africa drove a massive shift from indigenous religions to Christianity, yet the channels through which this transformation occurred remain poorly understood. Using a geographic regression…
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,…
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…
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 $10^5$ events from Africa spanning 20…
Yemen is considered a global terrorist base for Al-Qaeda and in recent years rampant violence is threatening social order. Here we show that the socio-economic origins of violence recently changed. Prior to 2008, violence can be attributed…
Terrorism instills fear in the minds of people and takes away the freedom of individuals to act as they will. Terrorism has turned out to be an international menace today. Here, we study the terrorist attack incidents which occurred in the…
This article examines the structure and spatial patterns of violent political organizations in the Sahel-Sahara, a region characterized by growing political instability over the last 20 years. Drawing on a public collection of disaggregated…
The underlying reasons behind modern terrorism are seemingly complex and intangible. Despite diverse causal mechanisms, research has shown that there exists general statistical patterns at the global scale that can shed light on human…
This paper explores the spatial and temporal diffusion of political violence in North and West Africa. It does so by endeavoring to represent the mental landscape that lives in the back of a group leader's mind as he contemplates strategic…
The rapid spread of radical ideologies in recent years has led to a worldwide string of terrorist attacks. Understanding how extremist tendencies germinate, develop, and drive individuals to action is important from a cultural standpoint,…
The sudden emergence of large-scale riots in otherwise unconnected cities across the UK in summer 2024 came as a shock for both government officials and citizens. Irrespective of these riots' specific trigger, a key question is how the…
In this paper, we have initiated an attempt to develop and understand the driving mechanisms that underlie fourth-generation warfare. We have undertaken this from a perspective of endeavoring to understand the drivers of these events from a…
We examine the contribution of Islamic legal institutions to the comparative economic decline of the Middle East behind Latin Europe, which can be observed since the late Middle Ages. To this end, we explore whether the sacralization of…
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…
Crime is pervasive into modern societies, although with different levels of diffusion across regions. Its dynamics are dependent on various socio-economic factors that make the overall picture particularly complex. While several theories…
To this day, terrorism persists as a worldwide threat, as exemplified by the ongoing lethal attacks perpetrated by ISIS in Iraq, Syria, Al Qaeda in Yemen, and Boko Haram in Nigeria. In response, states deploy various counterterrorism…