Related papers: Common indicators hurt armed conflict prediction
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…
Studies on interpersonal conflict have a long history and contain many suggestions for conflict typology. We use this as the basis of a novel annotation scheme and release a new dataset of situations and conflict aspect annotations. We then…
This paper proposes a model to explain the potential role of inter-group conflicts in determining the rise and fall of signaling norms. Individuals in a population are characterized by high and low productivity types and they are matched in…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
This paper examines the relationship between Official Development Assistance (ODA) and conflict in the ten largest aid-receiving African countries between 2009 and 2023. Using Ordinary Least Squares, Principal Component Analysis, and Ridge…
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…
Monitoring tools for anticipatory action are increasingly gaining traction to improve the efficiency and timeliness of humanitarian responses. Whilst predictive models can now forecast conflicts with high accuracy, translating these…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance across natural language tasks, but their ability to forecast violent conflict remains underexplored. We investigate whether LLMs possess meaningful parametric knowledge-encoded…
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…
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…
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'…
Predictions of fatalities from violent conflict on the PRIO-GRID-month (pgm) level are characterized by high levels of uncertainty, limiting their usefulness in practical applications. We discuss the two main sources of uncertainty for this…
Climate change is becoming a widely recognized risk factor of farmer-herder conflict in Africa. Using an 8 year dataset (Jan 2015 to Sep 2022) of detailed weather and terrain data across four African nations, we apply statistical and…
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,…