dorsal/arxiv
View SchemaScale Invariance in Global Terrorism
| Authors | Aaron Clauset, Maxwell Young |
|---|---|
| Categories | |
| ArXiv ID | physics/0502014 |
| URL | https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0502014 |
Abstract
Traditional analyses of international terrorism have not sought to explain the emergence of rare but extremely severe events. Using the tools of extremal statistics to analyze the set of terrorist attacks worldwide between 1968 and 2004, as compiled by the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT), we find that the relationship between the frequency and severity of terrorist attacks exhibits the ``scale-free'' property with an exponent of close to two. This property is robust, even when we restrict our analysis to events from a single type of weapon or events within major industrialized nations. We also find that the distribution of event sizes has changed very little over the past 37 years, suggesting that scale invariance is an inherent feature of global terrorism.
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"abstract": "Traditional analyses of international terrorism have not sought to explain\nthe emergence of rare but extremely severe events. Using the tools of extremal\nstatistics to analyze the set of terrorist attacks worldwide between 1968 and\n2004, as compiled by the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of\nTerrorism (MIPT), we find that the relationship between the frequency and\nseverity of terrorist attacks exhibits the ``scale-free\u0027\u0027 property with an\nexponent of close to two. This property is robust, even when we restrict our\nanalysis to events from a single type of weapon or events within major\nindustrialized nations. We also find that the distribution of event sizes has\nchanged very little over the past 37 years, suggesting that scale invariance is\nan inherent feature of global terrorism.",
"arxiv_id": "physics/0502014",
"authors": [
"Aaron Clauset",
"Maxwell Young"
],
"categories": [
"physics.soc-ph",
"cond-mat.other",
"physics.data-an"
],
"title": "Scale Invariance in Global Terrorism",
"url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0502014"
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