E. Restrepo | Searcharxiv

arXiv2017

New Online Ecology of Adversarial Aggregates: ISIS and beyond

Support for extremist entities - whether from the far right, or far left - often manages to survive globally online despite significant external pressure, and may ultimately inspire violent acts by individuals having no obvious prior history of extremism. Examining longitudinal records of extremist online activity, we uncovered an ecology evolving on a daily timescale that drives online support, and we provide a mathematical theory that describes it. The ecology features self-organized aggregates (online groups such as on Facebook or another social media analog) that proliferate preceding the onset of recent real-world campaigns, and adopt novel adaptive mechanisms to enhance their survival. One of the predictions is that development of large, potentially potent online groups can be thwarted by targeting smaller ones.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2005

From old wars to new wars and global terrorism

Even before 9/11 there were claims that the nature of war had changed fundamentally. The 9/11 attacks created an urgent need to understand contemporary wars and their relationship to older conventional and terrorist wars, both of which exhibit remarkable regularities. The frequency-intensity distribution of fatalities in "old wars", 1816-1980, is a power-law with exponent 1.80. Global terrorist attacks, 1968-present, also follow a power-law with exponent 1.71 for G7 countries and 2.5 for non-G7 countries. Here we analyze two ongoing, high-profile wars on opposite sides of the globe - Colombia and Iraq. Our analysis uses our own unique dataset for killings and injuries in Colombia, plus publicly available data for civilians killed in Iraq. We show strong evidence for power-law behavior within each war. Despite substantial differences in contexts and data coverage, the power-law coefficients for both wars are tending toward 2.5, which is a value characteristic of non-G7 terrorism as opposed to old wars. We propose a plausible yet analytically-solvable model of modern insurgent warfare, which can explain these observations.

physics.soc-ph↗