# A complex network analysis of ethnic conflicts and human rights violations

## TL;DR

This paper uses complex network analysis on news data to uncover patterns and influential actors in ethnic conflicts and human rights violations, revealing long-term effects and potential intervention strategies.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel network-based approach to analyze socio-political events and identifies key actors and their roles in the spread of conflicts and violations.

## Key findings

- Power law distributions in actor mentions and degrees
- Influential actors form a growing giant component
- Targeted removal of actors can mitigate event spread

## Abstract

News reports in media contain records of a wide range of socio-economic and political events in time. Using a publicly available, large digital database of news records, and aggregating them over time, we study the network of ethnic conflicts and human rights violations. Complex network analyses of the events and the involved actors provide important insights on the engaging actors, groups, establishments and sometimes nations, pointing at their long range effect over space and time. We find power law decays in distributions of actor mentions, co-actor mentions and degrees and dominance of influential actors and groups. Most influential actors or groups form a giant connected component which grows in time, and is expected to encompass all actors globally in the long run. We demonstrate how targeted removal of actors may help stop spreading unruly events. We study the cause-effect relation between types of events, and our quantitative analysis confirm that ethnic conflicts lead to human rights violations, while it does not support the converse.