# Inequality in Death from Social Conflicts: A Gini & Kolkata indices-based Study

## TL;DR

This study quantifies inequality in human deaths from conflicts and natural disasters using Gini and Kolkata indices, revealing extremely high inequality levels in man-made conflicts and their similarity to inequalities in academic citations.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel application of Lorenz curve-based inequality indices to compare social inequalities in conflict-related deaths and academic citations.

## Key findings

- High inequality indices ($g$=0.82, $k$=0.84) in conflict-related deaths.
- Natural disasters show even higher inequality measures.
- Man-made conflicts' inequality levels are comparable to those in academic citation distributions.

## Abstract

Human deaths caused by individual man-made conflicts (e.g., wars, armed-conflicts, terrorist-attacks etc.) occur unequally across the events (conflicts) and such inequality (in deaths) have been studied here using Lorenz curve and values of the inequality indices Gini ($g$) and Kolkata ($k$) have been estimated from it. The data are taken from various well-known databases maintained by some Universities and Peace Research Institutes. The inequality measures for man-made conflicts are found to have very high values ($g$ = $0.82 ~\pm~ $0.02, $k$ = $0.84~ \pm~ $0.02), which is rarely seen in economic (income or wealth) inequality measures across the world ($g \leq 0.4$, $k \leq 0.6$; presumably because of various welfare measures). We also investigated the inequalities in human deaths from natural disasters (like earthquakes, floods, etc.). Interestingly, we observe that the social inequality measures ($g$ and $k$ values) from man-made conflicts compare well with those of academic centers (inequality in citations; found in earlier studies) of different institutions of the world, while those for natural disasters can be even higher. We discuss about the `similarity classes' of social inequality (similar higher values of $g$ and $k$ indices) for man-made competitive societies like academic institutions and man-made social conflicts, and connect our observations with that of the growing recent trend of economic inequality across the world (with rapid disappearance of welfare strategies).