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Modeling the Size of Wars: From Billiard Balls to Sandpiles

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2003

LARS-ERIK CEDERMAN
LARS-ERIK CEDERMAN
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of Government, Harvard University, 1033 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138 ([email protected]).
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Abstract

Richardson's finding that the severity of interstate wars is power law distributed belongs to the most striking empirical regularities in world politics. This is a regularity in search of a theory. Drawing on the principles of self-organized criticality, I propose an agent-based model of war and state formation that exhibits power-law regularities. The computational findings suggest that the scale-free behavior depends on a process of technological change that leads to contextually dependent, stochastic decisions to wage war.Early drafts of this paper were prepared for presentation at the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, Ohio State University, Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Cornell University. I am grateful to the participants in those meetings and to Robert Axelrod, Claudio Cioffi-Revilla, Fredrik Liljeros, and the editor and the anonymous reviewers of this journal for excellent comments. Laszlo Gulyas helped me reimplement the model in Java and Repast. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the generous support of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies. Nevertheless, I bear the full responsibility for any inaccuracies and omissions.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 97 , Issue 1 , February 2003 , pp. 135 - 150
Copyright
© 2003 by the American Political Science Association

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