Guns and lightning: Power law distributions in intrastate conflict intensity dynamics

Christoph Trinn and Lennard Naumann
Additional contact information
Christoph Trinn: Institute of Political Science, 9144Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
Lennard Naumann: 28422WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Berlin, Germany

Conflict Management and Peace Science, 2023, vol. 40, issue 4, 373-397

Abstract: The discovery of power laws in conflict intensities has spurred numerous explanation attempts. Two different interpretations have persisted: the notion that power laws are spurious results of random processes and the opposing view that power-law distributions attest to endogenous dynamics linked to self-organized criticality (SOC). We substantiate the SOC forest-fire model for intrastate conflicts, conceptualizing conflict potential as social pressure, measured by horizontal inequality. This potential is triggered by infinitesimal events. Their occurrence depends on the interaction density between conflict actors, operationalized as the conjunction of state capacity and non-state governance. In a global analysis of 143 conflict dyads, we find that 40 conform to a power law and 33 to a stretched exponential distribution, the two outcomes predicted by the model. We find evidence that the forest-fire model is a plausible approximation of the dynamics of intrastate conflicts, accounting for both the conformity and the non-conformity to power laws.

Keywords: intrastate conflicts; power law; self-organized criticality; forest-fire model; event size distributions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/07388942221092126 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:compsc:v:40:y:2023:i:4:p:373-397

DOI: 10.1177/07388942221092126

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Conflict Management and Peace Science from Peace Science Society (International)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().