Experts Find the Patterns of Violence

Scientists in the United Kingdom, at the University of London, have recently released a new analysis on violent behavior, which follows the patterns that violence takes during conflicts. The findings could be of significant importance for preventing large numbers of casualties in future conflicts, the group says. In their research, the investigators looked at several decades of violent acts, and analyzed the behavior of all those involved, while using statistical tools to search for emerging patterns. Details of the work appear in the latest issue of the respected scientific journal Nature, the BBC News reports.

The team took into account some 54,679 violent events, which took place over the course of nine historic, or ongoing, insurgencies and revolutions, such as the ones currently going on in Northern Ireland, Afghanistan and Iraq. “We found strikingly regular and similar patterns in the sizes and timings of violent events,” UL Royal Holloway economist, Professor Michael Spagat, explains. He reveals that the number of large-scale attacks, by either of the opposing forces, tended to exceed the predicted one by far. Also, most of these attacks were organized in bursts, or clusters, over time. One burst was then followed by a period of relative calm, after which the cycle began again.

The scientist also revealed that the correlations that were found between the intensity of the attacks (quantified as the number of casualties) and their frequency over time could be drawn as a straight line on a graph. “If you look at a single conflict, you first see this regular pattern: they all line up nicely on a straight line on logarithmic axes. Secondly, as you range across conflicts, they're fitting almost the same pattern. You've got this pattern of bursts, with large events being less rare than people might suppose,” Spagat says.

“That suggests your emergency response planning has to have a lot of capacity, and that this capacity would be under-utilized almost all of the time. But then you shouldn't be surprised when you get bursts of large events and the trauma units are overloaded. You should put a lot of slack into your disaster planning,” he adds. The UL group believes that the omnipresence of these patterns may be a newly found knowledge that could be used by planners in the future in such a way that large numbers of casualties are avoided.

“We could never say with certainty that there were going to be 10 attacks on one day, for example. Within the framework of the wars in Iraq or Colombia, you could break days down into busy days, average days and light days. If, over the last three days, you've had a pattern of busy, busy, light, you could look at three-day windows in the past that show the same pattern. Then you could make a prediction on whether the next day was likely to be busy, average or light,” Spagat concludes.