Related papers: Scale Invariance in Global Terrorism
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…
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…
This paper introduces new methods for studying the prevalence of terrorism around the world and over time. Our analysis treats spatial prevalence of terrorism, the changing profile of groups carrying out the acts of terrorism, and trends in…
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…
The underlying reasons behind modern terrorism are seemingly complex and intangible. Despite diverse causal mechanisms, research has shown that there exists general statistical patterns at the global scale that can shed light on human…
Quantities with right-skewed distributions are ubiquitous in complex social systems, including political conflict, economics and social networks, and these systems sometimes produce extremely large events. For instance, the 9/11 terrorist…
Capturing dynamics of operational similarity among terrorist groups is critical to provide actionable insights for counter-terrorism and intelligence monitoring. Yet, in spite of its theoretical and practical relevance, research addressing…
Terrorism instills fear in the minds of people and takes away the freedom of individuals to act as they will. Terrorism has turned out to be an international menace today. Here, we study the terrorist attack incidents which occurred in the…
We present and analyze a model of the frequency of severe terrorist attacks, which generalizes the recently proposed model of Johnson et al. This model, which is based on the notion of self-organized criticality and which describes how…
The proliferation of terrorism is a serious concern in national and international security, as its spread is seen as an existential threat to Western liberal democracies. Understanding and effectively modelling the spread of terrorism…
To this day, terrorism persists as a worldwide threat, as exemplified by the ongoing lethal attacks perpetrated by ISIS in Iraq, Syria, Al Qaeda in Yemen, and Boko Haram in Nigeria. In response, states deploy various counterterrorism…
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…
Temporal networks are a fundamental and flexible way of describing the activities, relationships, and evolution of any complex system. Global terrorism is one of the biggest concerns of recent times. It is also an example of a temporal…
Turbulence is known to show intermittency. That is, statistical properties vary with the length scale in a way not accounted for by statistical similarity where dimensionless ratios of moments are constant. Intermittency occurs even in the…
We study the spatiotemporal correlation of terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda, ISIS, and local insurgents, in six geographical areas identified via $k$-means clustering applied to the Global Terrorism Database. All surveyed organizations exhibit…
Conserved quantities are obtained and analyzed in the new models with global scale invariance recently proposed. Such models allow for non tivial scalar field potentials and masses for particles, so that the scale symmetry must be broken…
The frequency and magnitude of weather extreme events have increased significantly during the past few years in response to anthropogenic climate change. However, global statistical characteristics and underlying physical mechanisms are…
Scale invariance profoundly influences the dynamics and structure of complex systems, spanning from critical phenomena to network architecture. Here, we propose a precise definition of scale-invariant networks by leveraging the concept of a…
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,…
Extreme events with potential deadly outcomes, such as those organized by terror groups, are highly unpredictable in nature and an imminent threat to society. In particular, quantifying the likelihood of a terror attack occurring in an…