Modeling the size of wars: From billiard balls to sandpiles

Authored by Lars-Erik Cederman

Date Published: 2003-02

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Model Documentation: Other Narrative Pseudocode Mathematical description

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Abstract

Richardson's finding that the severity of interstate wars is power law distributed belongs to the most striking empirical regularities in world politics. This is a regularity in search of a theory. Drawing on the principles of self-organized criticality, I propose an agent-based model of war and state formation that exhibits power-law regularities. The computational findings suggest that the scale-free behavior depends on a process of technological change that leads to contextually dependent, stochastic decisions to wage war.

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