Related papers: Explaining conflict violence in terms of conflict …
In this article, we explore how the escalating victimization of civilians during civil wars is mirrored in the fragmented distribution of territorial control, focusing on the Colombian armed conflict. Through an exhaustive characterization…
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…
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…
We first pursue the study of how hierarchy provides a well-adapted tool for the analysis of change. Then, using a time sequence-constrained hierarchical clustering, we develop the practical aspects of a new approach to wavelet regression.…
Protracted conflict is one of the largest human challenges that have persistently undermined economic and social progress. In recent years, there has been increased emphasis on using statistical and physical science models to better…
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…
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…
Women in Colombia face difficulties related to the patriarchal traits of their societies and well-known conflict afflicting the country since 1948. In this critical context, our aim is to study the relationship between baseline…
The risk of conflict is exasperated by a multitude of internal and external factors. Current multivariate analysis paints diverse causal risk profiles that vary with time. However, these profiles evolve and a universal model to understand…
In many data scientific problems, we are interested in inferring causal relationships in the data generating mechanism. Here, we consider the following real-world question: how has the Colombian conflict influenced tropical forest loss?…
We are able to unify various disparate claims and results in the literature, that stand in the way of a unified description and understanding of human conflict. First, we provide a reconciliation of the numerically different exponent values…
Acts of political violence in the continental United States have increased dramatically in the last decade. For this rise in political violence, we are interested in where and when such incidents occur: how are the locations and times of…
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…
In this paper I propose a 'mechanism' for the explanation of power-law characteristics of casualty dynamics in inter-state wars, intra-state wars and terrorist attacks: the scale-free physical organization of social systems. Other…
I study the relationship between the likelihood of a violent domestic conflict and the risk that such a conflict "externalizes" (i.e. spreads to another country by creating an international dispute). I consider a situation in which a…
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…
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'…
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…
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…