Physics – Physics and Society
Scientific paper
2009-02-04
Journal of Conflict Resolution 54(1): 179-197 (2010)
Physics
Physics and Society
10 pages, 2 figures, 3 appendices. Pre-print version; journal version is available at Sage Publications (see DOI below)
Scientific paper
10.1177/0022002709352452
We present and analyze a model of the frequency of severe terrorist attacks, which generalizes the recently proposed model of Johnson et al. This model, which is based on the notion of self-organized criticality and which describes how terrorist cells might aggregate and disintegrate over time, predicts that the distribution of attack severities should follow a power-law form with an exponent of alpha=5/2. This prediction is in good agreement with current empirical estimates for terrorist attacks worldwide, which give alpha=2.4 \pm 0.2, and which we show is independent of certain details of the model. We close by discussing the utility of this model for understanding terrorism and the behavior of terrorist organizations, and mention several productive ways it could be extended mathematically or tested empirically.
Clauset Aaron
Wiegel Frederik W.
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