Laws of war? Social network dynamics underlying events in Iraq, street-gangs and online games
N. Johnson (Department of Physics, University of Miami), Z. Zhao, J. C. Bohorquez (Department of Industrial Engineering, Universidad de los Andes, Bogota', Columbia), P. M. Hui (Department of Physics, Chinese University of Hong Kong), X. Chen (Department of Physics, Suzhou University), M. Spagat (Department of Economics, Royal Holloway College, University of London and Department of Physics, University of Oxford), S. Gourley (Department of Physics, University of Oxford)
We present a plausible microscopic mechanism to explain the collective behaviour observed in a wide range of human conflict situations – from ongoing insurgent wars and terrorism, through to street-gangs and even online games. Inspired by recent work in the field of Complex Systems, we propose agent-based models of dynamically evolving networks which explain the observed real-world data in terms of the microscopic behaviour (e.g. decision-making activities) of dynamically evolving gangs. For example, for the case of modern insurgent conflicts, our results are in close agreement with observed casualty data [1].
The overall project is a collaboration with Drs. George Tita and Nic Ducheneaut in California, USA, and Roberto Zarama, Universidad de Los Andes, Bogota, Colombia
[1] Johnson N.F., Spagat M., Restrepo J.A., Becerra O., Bohorquez J.C., Suarez N., Restrepo E.M., Zarama R., “Universal patterns in modern conflicts”, e-print available at http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/physics/0605035