Large-scale armed conflict is a characteristic feature of modern civilization . The statistics of conflict show remarkable regularities like power law distributions of fatalities and durations, but these properties have remained disparate, albeit prominent, features of conflict . We explore a large, detailed data set of 10^5 armed conflict reports spanning 20 years across nearly 10^4 kilometers. By  clustering spatiotemporally proximate events into conflict avalanches, we show that the number of conflict reports, fatalities, duration, and geographic extent satisfy consistent  scaling relations. The temporal evolution of conflicts measured by these scaling variables display emergent symmetry, reflecting self-similarity in the trajectories of conflict avalanches. Taken together, our measurements describe a system that is distinct from prevailing explanations of conflict growth such as self-similar forest fire models. A natural interpretation of our findings is in the language of criticality, suggesting that armed conflicts are dominated by a low-dimensional process that scales with physical dimensions in a surprisingly unified and predictable way.
Large-scale armed conflict is a characteristic feature of modern societies . The statistics of conflict show remarkable regularities like power law distributions of fatalities and duration, but lack a unifying framework . We explore a large, detailed data set of 10^5 armed conflict reports spanning 20 years across nearly 10^4 kilometers. By systematically clustering spatiotemporally proximate events into conflict avalanches, we show that the number of conflict reports, fatalities, duration, and geographic extent satisfy consistent power law scaling relations. The temporal evolution of conflicts measured by these scaling variables display emergent symmetry, collapsing onto a universal dynamical profile over a range of scales. The measured exponents and dynamical profiles describe a system distinct from prevailing explanations of conflict growth such as forest fire models. Our findings suggest that armed conflicts are dominated by a low-dimensional process that scales with physical dimensions in a surprisingly unified and predictable way.
R
civilization
societies
R
durations, but these properties have remained disparate, albeit prominent, features of conflict
duration, but lack a unifying framework
A
systematically
A
power law
R
reflecting self-similarity in the trajectories of conflict avalanches. Taken together, our measurements
collapsing onto a universal dynamical profile over a range of scales. The measured exponents and dynamical profiles
D
that is
D
self-similar
R
A natural interpretation of our findings is in the language of criticality, suggesting
Our findings suggest