Related papers: Escalation dynamics and the severity of wars
Physical interactions between particles are the result of the exchange of gauge bosons. Human interactions are mediated by the exchange of messages, goods, money, promises, hostilities, etc. While in the physical world interactions and…
Behavioural differences may arise in the absence of genetic or environmental variation. Chaotic dynamics may influence behavioural development, and so this among-individual variation. We discuss methods and experimental designs to test this…
Seasonal variation in environmental variables, and in rates of contact among individuals, are fundamental drivers of infectious disease dynamics. Unlike most periodically-forced physical systems, for which the precise pattern of forcing is…
In the spirit of Richardson's original (1948) study of the statistics of deadly conflicts, we study the frequency and severity of terrorist attacks worldwide since 1968. We show that these events are uniformly characterized by the…
The recent availability of electronic datasets containing large volumes of communication data has made it possible to study human behavior on a larger scale than ever before. From this, it has been discovered that across a diverse range of…
The causal mechanism between climate and political violence is fraught with complex mechanisms. Current quantitative causal models rely on one or more assumptions: (1) the climate drivers persistently generate conflict, (2) the causal…
A primary goal of social science research is to understand how latent group memberships predict the dynamic process of network evolution. In the modeling of international militarized conflicts, for instance, scholars hypothesize that…
In this monograph, we introduce a new model in population dynamics that describes two species sharing the same environmental resources in a situation of open hostility. The interactions among these populations are described not in terms of…
Conflict destabilizes social interactions and impedes cooperation at multiple scales of biological organization. Of fundamental interest are the causes of turbulent periods of conflict. We analyze conflict dynamics in a monkey society model…
Major revolts have recently erupted in parts of the Middle East with substantial international repercussions. Predicting, coping with and winning those revolts have become a grave problem for many regimes and for world powers. We propose a…
Emergence and causality are two fundamental concepts for understanding complex systems. They are interconnected. On one hand, emergence refers to the phenomenon where macroscopic properties cannot be solely attributed to the cause of…
Polarization is a problem in modern society. Understanding how opinions evolve through social interactions is crucial for addressing conditions that lead to polarization, consensus, or opinion diversity. Classical opinion dynamics models…
Democracies employ elections at various scales to select officials at the corresponding levels of administration. The geographical distribution of political opinion, the policy issues delegated to each level, and the multilevel interactions…
We analyze the database prepared by Brecke (Brecke 2011) for violent conflict, covering some 600 years of human history. After normalizing the data for the global human population, we find that the number of casualties tends to follow a…
Understanding the social conditions that tend to increase or decrease polarization is important for many reasons. We study a network-structured agent-based model of opinion dynamics, extending a model previously introduced by Flache and…
Over the past decades much effort has been devoted towards understanding and forecasting natural hazards. However, earthquake forecasting skill is still very limited and remains a great scientific challenge. The limited earthquake…
Many causal processes have spatial and temporal dimensions. Yet the classic causal inference framework is not directly applicable when the treatment and outcome variables are generated by spatio-temporal point processes. We extend the…
We consider a model of adversarial dynamics consisting of three populations, labelled Blue, Green and Red, which evolve under a system of first order nonlinear differential equations. Red and Blue populations are adversaries and interact…
The recent availability of data for cities has allowed scientists to exhibit scalings which present themselves in the form of a power-law dependence with population of various socio-economical and structural indicators. We propose here a…
Empirical records of epidemics reveal that fluctuations are important factors for the spread and prevalence of infectious diseases. The exact manner in which fluctuations affect spreading dynamics remains poorly known. Recent analytical and…