Related papers: Escalation dynamics and the severity of wars
Analysis of wars and conflicts between regions has been an important topic of interest throughout the history of humankind. In the latter part of the 20th century, in the aftermath of two World Wars and the shadow of nuclear, biological,…
A general model for opinion formation and competition, like in ideological struggles is formulated. The underlying set is a closed one, like a country but in which the population size is variable in time. Several ideologies compete to…
The dynamics of a wide range of real systems, from email patterns to earthquakes, display a bursty, intermittent nature, characterized by short timeframes of intensive activity followed by long times of no or reduced activity. The…
The dynamics of a nonequilibrium system can become complex because the system has many components (e.g., a human brain), because the system is strongly driven from equilibrium (e.g., large Reynolds-number flows), or because the system…
Costly pre-play messages can deter unnecessary wars - but the same messages can also entrench stalemates once violence begins. We develop an overlapping-generations model of a security dilemma with persistent group types (normal vs bad),…
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…
Opinion dynamics concerns social processes through which populations or groups of individuals agree or disagree on specific issues. As such, modelling opinion dynamics represents an important research area that has been progressively…
We propose a simple mathematical model to describe the evolution of violent crimes. For such purpose, we built a model based on ordinary differential equations that take into account the number of violent crimes and the number of legal and…
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…
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…
Human behaviors are often driven by human interests. Despite intense recent efforts in exploring the dynamics of human behaviors, little is known about human-interest dynamics, partly due to the extreme difficulty in accessing the human…
Scaling has been proposed as a powerful tool to analyze the properties of complex systems, and in particular for cities where it describes how various properties change with population. The empirical study of scaling on a wide range of…
The Multiscale Law of Requisite Variety is a scientific law relating, at each scale, the variation in an environment to the variation in internal state that is necessary for effective response by a system. While this law has been used to…
Arrival times of requests to print in a student laboratory were analyzed. Inter-arrival times between subsequent requests follow a universal scaling law relating time intervals and the size of the request, indicating a scale invariant…
We study the problem of resilient strategies in the presence of uncertainty. Resilient strategies enable an agent to make decisions that are robust against disturbances. In particular, we are interested in those disturbances that are able…
Cities are often compared through scaling laws, usually expressed as power-law relations between population size and aggregate urban quantities related to infrastructure, socioeconomic activity, or environmental impacts. These laws are…
This study extends classical models of spreading epidemics to describe the phenomenon of contagious public outrage, which eventually leads to the spread of violence following a disclosure of some unpopular political decisions and/or…
When complex systems are driven to extinction by some external factor, their non-stationary dynamics can present an intermittent behaviour between relative tranquility and burst of activity whose consequences are often catastrophic. To…
In the United States, firearm-related deaths and injuries are a major public health issue. Because of limited federal action, state policies are particularly important, and their evaluation informs the actions of other policymakers. The…
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…