Department of Industrial Engineering and CEIBA Complex Systems Research Center, Universidad de Los Andes, Bogota, Colombia.
Nature. 2009 Dec 17;462(7275):911-4. doi: 10.1038/nature08631.
Many collective human activities, including violence, have been shown to exhibit universal patterns. The size distributions of casualties both in whole wars from 1816 to 1980 and terrorist attacks have separately been shown to follow approximate power-law distributions. However, the possibility of universal patterns ranging across wars in the size distribution or timing of within-conflict events has barely been explored. Here we show that the sizes and timing of violent events within different insurgent conflicts exhibit remarkable similarities. We propose a unified model of human insurgency that reproduces these commonalities, and explains conflict-specific variations quantitatively in terms of underlying rules of engagement. Our model treats each insurgent population as an ecology of dynamically evolving, self-organized groups following common decision-making processes. Our model is consistent with several recent hypotheses about modern insurgency, is robust to many generalizations, and establishes a quantitative connection between human insurgency, global terrorism and ecology. Its similarity to financial market models provides a surprising link between violent and non-violent forms of human behaviour.
许多集体人类活动，包括暴力行为，都表现出普遍的模式。从 1816 年到 1980 年的整个战争以及恐怖袭击中的伤亡规模分布分别显示出近似的幂律分布。然而，跨越战争的普遍模式，以及冲突中事件的规模分布或时间分布的可能性几乎没有被探索过。在这里，我们表明不同叛乱冲突中暴力事件的规模和时间表现出显著的相似性。我们提出了一个统一的人类叛乱模型，该模型再现了这些共性，并根据交战规则的潜在规则定量解释了冲突的具体变化。我们的模型将每个叛乱群体视为遵循共同决策过程的动态演变的、自组织群体的生态系统。我们的模型与最近关于现代叛乱的几个假设一致，对许多概括具有鲁棒性，并在人类叛乱、全球恐怖主义和生态学之间建立了定量联系。它与金融市场模型的相似性为人类暴力和非暴力行为之间提供了一个惊人的联系。
