The thinking goes like this. Society is a complex web of social, political, and economic forces that depend on the network of links between individuals and the countries they represent. These links are constantly rearranging, sometimes because of violence and death. When the level of rearrangement and associated violence rises above a threshold level, we describe the resulting pattern as war.
Bardi and co’s key finding is that the data on violent conflict clearly displays this power law signature. Most violent conflicts involve a small number of deaths, but a small number involve many millions of deaths. “War seems to follow the same statistical laws as other catastrophic phenomena, such as hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, floods and landslides, whose distribution follows approximate power law,” they say.
That’s important because it allows network theorists to study war using the same mathematical tools developed for a wide range of other network phenomena. It also provides new insights into the nature and causes of war. For example, historians often focus on the specific events that trigger war. But this new approach suggests that the trigger does not determine the eventual size of a war... the size of a war has little to do with the triggering incident but instead depends on the network of political, social, and economic tensions that exist at the time. These are notoriously hard to measure. That’s why claims that a war can be fought on limited terms must always be greeted with skepticism.
Bardi and co use this approach to explore the idea that humanity is becoming more peaceful and say the evidence is not persuasive on this point. “There is little evidence supporting the idea that humankind is progressing toward a more peaceful world,” they conclude. That’s because wars have become less common but at the same time more destructive.
[It seems like a basically sound claim to me, though I've not read the original paper. I would quibble with the attention grabbing statement that war is "hard-wired into the structure of society" though - this implies it is inevitable, whereas the it could be heavily dependent on the structure of the network. I would very much like to see a study examining whether it's the network of society itself that makes war more or less probable. Still, the point that war becoming less frequent does not make it less dangerous is an important one.]
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612704/data-mining-adds-evidence-that-war-is-baked-into-the-structure-of-society/
One of the problems with this is that there might well be an observer effect: peace is at least partly dependent on the expectation of peace.
ReplyDeleteAnd trust in networks is required for the benefits of undisrupted networks to be experienced.
Despite the unsettling ramifications, the extent to which we are all participants in (and expressions or manifestations of) turbulent statistical or probabilistic eddies and currents is an emergent revelation of contemporary data sciences. One of the most unpalatable consequences of this kind of observation is the extent to which our aspirations to unique individuation and self-determination tend to be encapsulated and (to some extent) invalidated by the belligerent tribal herding within which humanity is so often entangled.
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