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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 20: Focus Session: Statistical Physics of Political Systems

SOE 20.1: Invited Talk

Thursday, March 21, 2024, 15:00–15:30, MA 001

A closer look at the multiple scales of armed conflict — •Edward Lee — Complexity Science Hub Vienna, Vienna, Austria

Conflicts, like many social processes, are related events that span multiple scales in time, from the instantaneous to multi-year development, and in space, from one neighborhood to continents. Yet, there is little systematic work on connecting the multiple scales, formal treatment of causality between events, and measures of uncertainty for how events are related. We develop a method for extracting causally related chains of events that addresses the limitations. Our method explicitly accounts for an adjustable spatial and temporal scale of interaction for clustering individual events from a detailed data set, the Armed Conflict Event & Location Data Project. With it, we discover a mesoscale ranging from a week to a few months and tens to hundreds of kilometers, where long-range correlations and nontrivial dynamics relating conflict events emerge. Importantly, clusters in the mesoscale, while extracted from conflict statistics, are identifiable with mechanism cited in field studies. We leverage our technique to identify zones of causal interaction around hotspots that naturally incorporate uncertainties. Conflict avalanches represent systematic clusters distinct from qualitative, sociopolitical labels. We use them to identify categories of conflict and are developing techniques to leverage them for conflict prediction in concert with highly resolved data sets on geographic, climatic, and socioeconomic variables. Thus, we show how a systematic, data-driven, and scalable procedure extracts social objects for study, providing a scope for scrutinizing and predicting conflict and other processes.