2006/06/30 by Aaron Clauset, Maxwell Young, Kristian Skrede Gleditsch · 339 citations
Computer Science · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #COVID-19 epidemiological studies #Cartography #Computational Drug Discovery Methods #Computer science #Econometrics #Epistemology #Event (particle physics) #Geography #Law #Mathematics #Physics #Political science #Property (philosophy) #Scale (ratio) #Scale invariance #Stability (learning theory) #Statistical physics #Statistics #Terrorism #Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence #physics.data-an #physics.soc-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1177/0022002706296157
published in Journal of Conflict Resolution 51(1), 58-87 (SAGE Publishing) · 32 pages, 9 figures, 3 tables. Pre-print version; journal version is available at Sage Publications (see DOI below)
openalex publication_date 2007/02/01 · arxiv created 2007/03/06 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2020/11/23 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
In the spirit of Lewis Richardson’s original 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 phenomenon of “scale invariance,” that is, the frequency scales as an inverse power of the severity, P(x) Αx -α . We find that this property is a robust feature of terrorism, persisting when we control for economic development of the target country, the type of weapon used, and even for short time scales. Further, we show that the center of the distribution oscillates slightly with a period of roughly τ≈ 13 years, that there exist significant temporal correlations in the frequency of severe events, and that current models of event incidence cannot account for these variations or the scale invariance property of global terrorism. Finally, we describe a simple toy model for the generation of these statistics and briefly discuss its implications.