Pattern Analysis of World Conflicts over the past 600 years

TL;DR

This study analyzes 600 years of conflict data, revealing that casualties follow a power law distribution and conflicts decrease over time when normalized for population, supporting the view of war as a statistical network phenomenon.

Contribution

It provides a normalized, long-term statistical analysis of global conflicts, confirming power law distribution of casualties and a decreasing trend in conflicts over centuries.

Findings

Casualties follow a power law distribution.

Number of conflicts decreases over time.

War is linked to the network structure of society.

Abstract

We analyze the database prepared by Brecke (Brecke 2011) for violent conflict, covering some 600 years of human history. After normalizing the data for the global human population, we find that the number of casualties tends to follow a power law over the whole data series for the period considered, with no evidence of periodicity. We also observe that the number of conflicts, again normalized for the human population, show a decreasing trend as a function of time. Our result agree with previous analyses on this subject and tend to support the idea that war is a statistical phenomenon related to the network structure of the human society.