Many historians study war in terms of the actors involved and the decisions they make. It is often possible to describe how wars emerge from these stresses and to identify patterns of behavior that should be avoided in future.
But in recent years another, more powerful way to think about war has emerged. In this way of thinking, war is a simple but unavoidable network phenomenon that is hard-wired into the structure of society.
Today, we get an answer thanks to the work of Ugo Bardi at the University of Florence in Italy and a couple of colleagues, who have analyzed one of the largest historical databases of violent conflict and say its statistical properties are entirely consistent with the network theory of war. “Our result tends to support the idea that war is a statistical phenomenon related to the network structure of the human society,” they say.
Bardi and co begin with a data set compiled by Peter Breche at Georgia Tech University in Atlanta, which consists of the number of war fatalities each year between 1400 and 2000.
The analysis is straightforward. Bardi and co consider various kinds of trends over time, both in the raw data and in the data normalized to the world population. They then examine the statistical characteristics of this data.
