Phys.org January 8, 2021
The scaling law proposed in 1941 suggests smaller conflicts are scaled-down versions of bigger ones. This is surprising because one might think that big conflicts and small conflicts are the results of different kinds of processes and social problems. A team of researchers in the US (Santa Fe Institute, Cornell University, Arizona State University) built a new model analyzing data from two decades of armed conflicts in Africa. The dataset includes more than 100,000 events that occurred up to thousands of kilometers apart. They propose a randomly branching armed conflict model to relate the multiple properties to one another. The model incorporates a fractal lattice on which conflict spreads, uniform dynamics driving conflict growth, and regional virulence that modulates local conflict intensity. The quantitative constraints on scaling and universal dynamics they use to develop their minimal model serve more generally as a set of constraints for other models for armed conflict dynamics. They show how this approach similar to thermodynamics imparts mechanistic intuition and unifies multiple conflict properties, giving insight into causation, prediction, and intervention timing…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLEÂ