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| 1 |
ID:
077068
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| Publication |
2007.
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| Summary/Abstract |
In the spirit of Lewis Richardson's original 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," that is, the frequency scales as an inverse power of the severity, P(x) Ax- . 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 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.
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| 2 |
ID:
096115
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2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Previous work on the dynamics of conflicts where we see terrorism has tended to focus on whether we see shifts in attack mode following government countermeasures. We contend that many factors other than counterinsurgency can influence whether groups resort to terrorism, including competition between groups, as well as their relationship to public opinion and other political events. Hence, understanding terrorist tactics in prolonged conflicts with multiple actors requires us to consider a more general framework of innovation, imitation, competition and dependence between actors. We use disaggregated data on terrorist attacks, counterterrorism and public opinion in the Israel-Palestine conflict to jointly evaluate predictions derived from several conventional theories of strategic behaviour. We find that the strategic calculus of Palestinian groups is complex and cannot be treated as time invariant. Our results suggest that factors such as the degree of public support, inter-group competition, the anticipation of countermeasures and non-trivial non-violent payoffs have an observable effect on the strategic behaviour of the Palestinian groups, and that structural relationships are often far from constant over time.
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