Unifying casualty distributions within and across conflicts

The distribution of whole war sizes and the distribution of event sizes within individual wars, can both be well approximated by power laws where size is measured by the number of fatalities. However the power-law exponent value for whole wars has a substantially smaller magnitude – and hence a flat...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inHeliyon Vol. 6; no. 8; p. e04808
Main Authors Spagat, Michael, van Weezel, Stijn, Johnson Restrepo, D. Dylan, Zheng, Minzhang, Johnson, Neil F.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Elsevier Ltd 01.08.2020
Elsevier
Subjects
Conflict
Interdisciplinary
Modeling
Physics
Social systems
Sociophysics
Interdisciplinary
Social systems
Conflict
Modeling
Physics
Sociophysics
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Summary:The distribution of whole war sizes and the distribution of event sizes within individual wars, can both be well approximated by power laws where size is measured by the number of fatalities. However the power-law exponent value for whole wars has a substantially smaller magnitude – and hence a flatter distribution – than for individual wars. We provide detailed numerical evidence that confirms that these numerically different power-law exponent values are interrelated in a simple way by the effect of aggregating fatalities from individual events within wars to whole wars. We offer intuition for this finding and hence strengthen the case for a unified description and understanding of human conflict across scales. Physics; Sociophysics; Modeling; Social systems; Conflict; Interdisciplinary
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ISSN:2405-8440
2405-8440
DOI:10.1016/j.heliyon.2020.e04808