Phase Transitions of Civil Unrest across Countries and Time

TL;DR

This paper models civil unrest as a series of phase transitions, using a macro-level statistical approach on global data, revealing universal patterns and regional clustering in societal upheavals.

Contribution

It introduces a novel macro-level statistical model for civil unrest, demonstrating its effectiveness across diverse countries and uncovering universal and regional dynamics.

Findings

The model captures civil unrest characteristics across 170 countries.

Civil unrest tends to cluster geographically in specific regions.

A scale to quantify long-term unrest per country is proposed.

Abstract

Phase transitions, characterized by abrupt shifts between macroscopic patterns of organization, are ubiquitous in complex systems. Despite considerable research in the physical and natural sciences, the empirical study of this phenomenon in societal systems is relatively underdeveloped. The goal of this study is to explore whether the dynamics of collective civil unrest can be plausibly characterized as a sequence of recurrent phase shifts, with each phase having measurable and identifiable latent characteristics. Building on previous efforts to characterize civil unrest as a self-organized critical system, we introduce a macro-level statistical model of civil unrest and evaluate its plausibility using a comprehensive dataset of civil unrest events in 170 countries from 1946 to 2017. Our findings demonstrate that the macro-level phase model effectively captures the characteristics of civil unrest data from diverse countries globally and that universal mechanisms may underlie certain aspects of the dynamics of civil unrest. We also introduce a scale to quantify a country's long-term unrest per unit of time and show that civil unrest events tend to cluster geographically, with the magnitude of civil unrest concentrated in specific regions. Our approach has the potential to identify and measure phase transitions in various collective human phenomena beyond civil unrest, contributing to a better understanding of complex social systems.