Related papers: Escalation dynamics and the severity of wars
An explanation for the political processes leading to the sudden collapse of empires and states would be useful for understanding both historical and contemporary political events. We seek a general description of state collapse spanning…
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,…
In this article I discuss the outcome of an exploratory research project based on complexity science concepts and theories; this research is focused on the Great Power war dynamics in the time period 1495 - 1945. According to this research,…
The deterrent effect of military alliances is well documented and widely accepted. However, such work has typically assumed that alliances are exogenous. This is problematic as alliances may simultaneously influence the probability of…
We investigate structural features and processes associated with the onset of systemic conflict using an approach which integrates complex systems theory with network modeling and analysis. We present a signed network model of cooperation…
Publicly traded companies are fundamental units of contemporary economies and markets and are important mechanisms through which humans interact with their environments. Understanding the general properties that underlie the processes of…
This study examines whether there has been a decline in the risk of death by battle during wars, testing the 'long peace' hypothesis. The analysis relies on the Expanded War Dataset (Gleditsch, 2004) covering intra- and inter-state wars…
The dynamics of ``vicious'', continuously growing civilizations (domains), which engage in ``war'' whenever two domains meet, is investigated. In the war event, the smaller domain is annihilated, while the larger domain is reduced in size…
Forest-fire waiting times, defined as the time between successive events above a certain size in a given region, are calculated for Italy. The probability densities of the waiting times are found to verify a scaling law, despite that fact…
Consider a uniformly mixing population which grows as a super-critical linear birth and death process. At some time an infectious disease (of SIR or SEIR type) is introduced by one individual being infected from outside. It is shown that…
Understanding the statistical dynamics of growth and inequality is a fundamental challenge to ecology and society. Recent analyses of wealth and income dynamics in contemporary societies show that economic inequality is very dynamic and…
Historical episodes such as the World War I "live-and-let-live" system and the Christmas Truce of 1914 demonstrate that opposing military units can establish spontaneous, local cooperation even in extreme conflict environments. Such…
This paper examines a government's strategic resource allocation choices when facing an opposing group whose military power is uncertain. We investigate how this uncertainty affects the government's decision to divide resources in a way…
From the perspective developed in this paper, it can be argued that exponential population growth resulted in the exponential decrease of the life-span of consecutive stable periods during the life-span of the European international system…
The dynamical evolution of many economic, sociological, biological and physical systems tends to be dominated by a relatively small number of unexpected, large changes (`extreme events'). We study the large, internal changes produced in a…
Governments are increasingly considering integrating autonomous AI agents in high-stakes military and foreign-policy decision-making, especially with the emergence of advanced generative AI models like GPT-4. Our work aims to scrutinize the…
Extreme events can come either from point processes, when the size or energy of the events is above a certain threshold, or from time series, when the intensity of a signal surpasses a threshold value. We are particularly concerned by the…
This paper analyzes the macroeconomic consequences of military spending and militarization within a dynamic growth framework. Building on a Keynesian goods-market model, we examine how the allocation of government expenditure between…
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…
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…