Related papers: From old wars to new wars and global terrorism
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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 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,…
Although very large wars remain an enduring threat in global politics, we lack a clear understanding of how some wars become large and costly, while most do not. There are three possibilities: large conflicts start with and maintain intense…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…
We study the statistics of human deaths from wars, conflicts, similar man-made conflicts as well as natural disasters. The probability distribution of number of people killed in natural disasters as well as man made situations show power…
Protracted conflict is one of the largest human challenges that have persistently undermined economic and social progress. In recent years, there has been increased emphasis on using statistical and physical science models to better…
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…
In this article, we explore how the escalating victimization of civilians during civil wars is mirrored in the fragmented distribution of territorial control, focusing on the Colombian armed conflict. Through an exhaustive characterization…