MTS is the department’s Mind, Technology, and Society speaker series. It is hosted by a different faculty member each semester. Founded by a generous gift from Professors Robert Glushko and Pamela Samuelson, MTS brings researchers and industry professionals from across the globe to present a variety of interdisciplinary work in cognitive science. See our UCMerced CogSci youtube channel for videos of past MTS talks!
CIS graduate students, faculty, and staff, and all who are interested are invited! Members of other departments at UC Merced as well as the general public are encouraged to attend. (Note: current CIS Ph.D. students are required to attend MTS each semester in residence, to fulfill their COGS 250 course requirement).
Dr. Clauset's talk will be 3-4:30pm in COB 265, presenting on "Escalation dynamics and the severity of wars".
Abstract:
Although the risk of a very large war remains an enduring threat in global politics, we lack a clear understanding of why and how some wars escalate into severe and destructive conflicts, while most do not. Historically, both war sizes and durations tend to vary widely, with interstate wars tending to be about 10 times as severe as civil wars, while lasting on average about 40% as long, even as the sizes of both categories of war are highly variable. In this talk, I will show that a simple stochastic model of the escalation dynamics of war severity can explain the heavy-tailed distributions of both civil and interstate war sizes. Using disaggregated severity data for both types of conflict in the post-war era, I first show that the annual empirical risk of escalation and deescalation is symmetric and heavy-tailed, implying that high-variance escalation dynamics may be an inherent characteristic of armed conflict. Second, I will show that the tendency for interstate wars to be substantially larger than civil wars can be explained by population constraints on war size for civil wars, which interstate conflicts lack. Finally, I'll show how this model can be used to estimate the size distribution of potential wars, using several specific examples. I'll then close with some forward-looking commentary on the implications of escalation dynamics for understanding war expansion, internationalization, and stability.
For more information or to sign up for email announcements, please contact the talk series organizer: cis-mts-lead@lists.ucmerced.edu.
