Related papers: Escalation dynamics and the severity of wars
Lewis Fry Richardson argued that the frequency and severity of deadly conflicts of all kinds, from homicides to interstate wars and everything in between, followed universal statistical patterns: their frequency followed a simple Poisson…
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…
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…
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…
In most of the recent literature on state capacity, the significance of wars in state-building assumes that threats from foreign countries generate common interests among domestic groups, leading to larger investments in state capacity.…
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…
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…
The risk of systemic war seems dependant on the level of criticality and sensitivity of the International System, and the system's conditions. The level of criticality and sensitivity is dependant on the developmental stage of the…
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…
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…
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…
The International System is a self-organized system that shows emergent behavior. During the timeframe (1495-1945) covered in this study, a finite-time singularity and four accompanying accelerating log-periodic cycles shaped the dynamics…
Coalition forming is investigated among countries, which are coupled with short range interactions, under the influence of external fields produced by the existence of global alliances. The model rests on the natural model of coalition…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
Intermittent large amplitude events are seen in the temporal evolution of a state variable of many dynamical systems. Such intermittent large events suddenly start appearing in dynamical systems at a critical value of a system parameter and…
We study a model in which two players with opposing interests try to alter a status quo through instability-generating actions. We show that instability can be used to secure longer-term durable changes, even if it is costly to generate and…