A Universal Model of Global Civil Unrest

TL;DR

This paper investigates whether civil unrest across different countries and time periods is governed by universal mechanisms, using a nonlinear dynamical model to analyze historical unrest data and reveal similarities with natural hazards and epidemics.

Contribution

It introduces a universal, spatially extended dynamical model that reproduces the distribution of civil unrest events globally over nearly a century.

Findings

Civil unrest distributions are consistent with a nonlinear dynamical model.

Global unrest dynamics resemble natural hazards and epidemic spread.

The model captures long-term, cross-country unrest patterns.

Abstract

Civil unrest is a powerful form of collective human dynamics, which has led to major transitions of societies in modern history. The study of collective human dynamics, including collective aggression, has been the focus of much discussion in the context of modeling and identification of universal patterns of behavior. In contrast, the possibility that civil unrest activities, across countries and over long time periods, are governed by universal mechanisms has not been explored. Here, we analyze records of civil unrest of 170 countries during the period 1919-2008. We demonstrate that the distributions of the number of unrest events per year are robustly reproduced by a nonlinear, spatially extended dynamical model, which reflects the spread of civil disorder between geographic regions connected through social and communication networks. The results also expose the similarity between global social instability and the dynamics of natural hazards and epidemics.