arXiv subjects

Kristian Skrede Gleditsch

Publications and source records attributed to Kristian Skrede Gleditsch.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Escalation dynamics and the severity of wars

Although very large wars remain an enduring threat in global politics, we lack a clear understanding of how some wars become large and costly, while most do not. There are three possibilities: large conflicts start with and maintain intense fighting, they persist over a long duration, or they escalate in intensity over time. Using detailed within-conflict data on civil and interstate wars 1946--2008, we show that escalation dynamics -- variations in fighting intensity within an armed conflict -- play a fundamental role in producing large conflicts and are a generic feature of both civil and interstate wars. However, civil wars tend to deescalate when they become very large, limiting their overall severity, while interstate wars exhibit a persistent risk of continual escalation. A non-parametric model demonstrates that this distinction in escalation dynamics can explain the differences in the historical sizes of civil vs. interstate wars, and explain Richardson's Law governing the frequency and severity of interstate conflicts over the past 200 years. Escalation dynamics also drive enormous uncertainty in forecasting the eventual sizes of both hypothetical and ongoing civil wars, indicating a need to better understand the causes of escalation and deescalation within conflicts. The close relationship between the size, and hence the cost, of an armed conflict and its potential for escalation has broad implications for theories of conflict onset or termination and for risk assessment in international relations.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2024

The 2023/24 VIEWS Prediction Challenge: Predicting the Number of Fatalities in Armed Conflict, with Uncertainty

This draft article outlines a prediction challenge where the target is to forecast the number of fatalities in armed conflicts, in the form of the UCDP `best' estimates, aggregated to the VIEWS units of analysis. It presents the format of the contributions, the evaluation metric, and the procedures, and a brief summary of the contributions. The article serves a function analogous to a pre-analysis plan: a statement of the forecasting models made publicly available before the true future prediction window commences. More information on the challenge, and all data referred to in this document, can be found at https://viewsforecasting.org/research/prediction-challenge-2023.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2012

The developmental dynamics of terrorist organizations

We identify robust statistical patterns in the frequency and severity of violent attacks by terrorist organizations as they grow and age. Using group-level static and dynamic analyses of terrorist events worldwide from 1968-2008 and a simulation model of organizational dynamics, we show that the production of violent events tends to accelerate with increasing size and experience. This coupling of frequency, experience and size arises from a fundamental positive feedback loop in which attacks lead to growth which leads to increased production of new attacks. In contrast, event severity is independent of both size and experience. Thus larger, more experienced organizations are more deadly because they attack more frequently, not because their attacks are more deadly, and large events are equally likely to come from large and small organizations. These results hold across political ideologies and time, suggesting that the frequency and severity of terrorism may be constrained by fundamental processes.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2007

On the Frequency of Severe Terrorist Events

In the spirit of Richardson's original (1948) study of the statistics of deadly conflicts, we study the frequency and severity of terrorist attacks worldwide since 1968. We show that these events are uniformly characterized by the phenomenon of scale invariance, i.e., the frequency scales as an inverse power of the severity, P(x) ~ x^-alpha. We find that this property is a robust feature of terrorism, persisting when we control for economic development of the target country, the type of weapon used, and even for short time-scales. Further, we show that the center of the distribution oscillates slightly with a period of roughly tau ~ 13 years, that there exist significant temporal correlations in the frequency of severe events, and that current models of event incidence cannot account for these variations or the scale invariance property of global terrorism. Finally, we describe a simple toy model for the generation of these statistics, and briefly discuss its implications.

physics.soc-ph↗