Unifying casualty distributions within and across conflicts.
Conflict
Interdisciplinary
Modeling
Physics
Social systems
Sociophysics
Journal
Heliyon
ISSN: 2405-8440
Titre abrégé: Heliyon
Pays: England
ID NLM: 101672560
Informations de publication
Date de publication:
Aug 2020
Aug 2020
Historique:
received:
03
12
2019
revised:
28
07
2020
accepted:
25
08
2020
entrez:
14
9
2020
pubmed:
15
9
2020
medline:
15
9
2020
Statut:
epublish
Résumé
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.
Identifiants
pubmed: 32923727
doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2020.e04808
pii: S2405-8440(20)31651-0
pii: e04808
pmc: PMC7475112
doi:
Types de publication
Journal Article
Langues
eng
Pagination
e04808Informations de copyright
© 2020 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
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