Statistical sightings of better angels: Analysing the distribution of battle-deaths in interstate conflict over time

Céline Cunen, Nils Lid Hjort and Håvard Mokleiv Nygård
Additional contact information
Céline Cunen: Department of Mathematics, University of Oslo
Nils Lid Hjort: Department of Mathematics, University of Oslo
Håvard Mokleiv Nygård: Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO)

Journal of Peace Research, 2020, vol. 57, issue 2, 221-234

Abstract: Have great wars become less violent over time, and is there something we might identify as the long peace ? We investigate statistical versions of such questions, by examining the number of battle-deaths in the Correlates of War dataset, with 95 interstate wars from 1816 to 2007. Previous research has found this series of wars to be stationary, with no apparent change over time. We develop a framework to find and assess a change-point in this battle-deaths series. Our change-point methodology takes into consideration the power law distribution of the data, models the full battle-deaths distribution, as opposed to focusing merely on the extreme tail, and evaluates the uncertainty in the estimation. Using this framework, we find evidence that the series has not been as stationary as past research has indicated. Our statistical sightings of better angels indicate that 1950 represents the most likely change-point in the battle-deaths series – the point in time where the battle-deaths distribution might have changed for the better.

Keywords: change-point analyses; decline of war; interstate conflict; power law tails; war sizes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0022343319896843 (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:joupea:v:57:y:2020:i:2:p:221-234

DOI: 10.1177/0022343319896843

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Peace Research from Peace Research Institute Oslo
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().