2019/11/05 by Michael Spagat, Stijn van Weezel, Spagat, Michael +5
Health Professions · Social Sciences · #FOS: Physical sciences #Health and Conflict Studies #Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph) #Popular Physics (physics.pop-ph) #Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1911.01994
openalex publication_date 2019/11/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We are able to unify various disparate claims and results in the literature,\nthat stand in the way of a unified description and understanding of human\nconflict. First, we provide a reconciliation of the numerically different\nexponent values for fatality distributions across entire wars and within single\nwars. Second, we explain how ignoring the details of how conflict datasets are\ncompiled, can generate falsely negative evaluations from power-law distribution\nfitting. Third, we explain how a generative theory of human conflict is able to\nprovide a quantitative explanation of how most observed casualty distributions\nfollow approximate power-laws and how and why they deviate from it. In\nparticular, it provides a unified mechanistic interpretation of the origin of\nthese power-law deviations in terms of dynamical processes within the conflict.\nCombined, our findings strengthen the notion that a unified framework can be\nused to understand and quantitatively describe human conflict.\n