Common ecology quantifies human insurgency.

Area of Science:

• Social Sciences
• Ecology
• Conflict Studies

Background:

• Collective human activities, including violence, often display universal patterns.
• Previous research identified power-law distributions in war casualties and terrorist attack sizes.
• Within-conflict event patterns across diverse insurgencies remain largely unexplored.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate universal patterns in the size and timing of violent events within insurgent conflicts.
• To develop a unified model explaining commonalities and variations in human insurgency.
• To quantitatively link insurgency, global terrorism, and ecological principles.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of size distributions and timing of within-conflict events across different insurgencies.
• Development of a unified computational model of human insurgency.
• Modeling insurgent populations as evolving, self-organized groups with common decision-making.

Main Results:

• Violent events within insurgent conflicts exhibit remarkable similarities in size and timing.
• The proposed unified model successfully reproduces these commonalities.
• Conflict-specific variations are quantitatively explained by underlying rules of engagement.

Conclusions:

• Human insurgency displays universal patterns, similar to other collective behaviors and ecological systems.
• The unified model provides a quantitative framework connecting insurgency, global terrorism, and ecological dynamics.
• The model's parallels with financial market models suggest links between violent and non-violent human behaviors.