A Universal Model of Global Civil Unrest

Abstract

Civil unrest is a powerful form of collective human dynamics, which has led to major transitions of societies in modern history. The study of collective human dynamics, including collective aggression, has been the focus of much discussion in the context of modeling and identification of universal patterns of behavior. In contrast, the possibility that civil unrest activities, across countries and over long time periods, are governed by universal mechanisms has not been explored. Here, we analyze records of civil unrest of 170 countries during the period 1919-2008. We demonstrate that the distributions of the number of unrest events per year are robustly reproduced by a nonlinear, spatially extended dynamical model, which reflects the spread of civil disorder between geographic regions connected through social and communication networks. The results also expose the similarity between global social instability and the dynamics of natural hazards and epidemics.

8 pages, 3 figures

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• Gang Confrontation: The case of Medellin (Colombia)
• An analysis of protesting activity and trauma through mathematical and statistical models
• A Hierarchy of Linear Threshold Models for the Spread of Political Revolutions on Social Networks
• Worldwide bilateral geopolitical interactions network inferred from national disciplinary profiles
• Analysis of a model for the dynamics of riots