[2P5-GS-11] AI and Society

[2P5-GS-11-01] Power law of the inter-conflict interval

〇Hiroshi Okamoto¹, Iku Yoshimoto¹, Sota Kato², Budrul Ahsan², Shuji Shinohara³ (1. The University of Tokyo, 2. The Tokyo Foundation for Policy Research, 3. Tokyo Denki University)

[[Online]]

Keywords:power law, militarized interstate dispute, inter-conflict interval, communication, mutual information maximization

It has long been known that the size of war, measured by battle death, follows the power law (Richardson 1948; 1960). Here we report that the power law also resides in the temporal aspects of interstate armed conflict. For this, we define the inter-conflict interval (ICI) as the interval between the end of a conflict in a dyad and the start of the next conflict in the same dyad. From the dataset MID4.02 provided by the Correlates of War Project, we obtained 2,369 ICI samples. Using the rigorous statistical analysis proposed by Caluset, Shalizi & Newman (2009), we demonstrate that that the ICI samples follow a power-law distribution. We then put forward an information-theoretic model to account for the observed power-law property of ICIs. The model further predicts that a series of ICIs in each dyad is independently generated from an identical power-law distribution. We confirmed this prediction by statistically examining the autocorrelation of the series of ICIs in each dyad.