Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

POWER LAW • 551this analysis revealed that while there would be many smaller warsof relatively low lethality, there would also be fewer numbers of warswith high lethality. This power function relationship has held evenfor the wars from World War II to the Vietnam War.Neil F. Johnson, a physicist at Oxford University, along with sixcolleagues, published research in May 2006 under the title “UniversalPatterns Underlying Ongoing Wars and Terrorism” (publishedat http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/physics/0605035), based on data from theguerrilla insurgency in Colombia led by such groups as M-19, theNational Liberation Army, and the Revolutionary Armed Forcesof Colombia; the post-2001 insurgencies by al Qa’eda in Iraq andthe Taliban; and global rates of terrorism both in Group of Eight(G8) nations and non-G8 nations. Their results revealed that moderninsurgent and terrorist attacks similarly follow their own power lawinversely relating numbers of attacks to the intensity of such attacks.Based on the data from all post-2001 conflicts, excluding the Iraqconflict, their results showed that when individual conflict events,such as a guerrilla raid or a terrorist attack, are classified accordingto the resulting numbers of fatalities, n, then the number of such conflictsin any given year will be proportional to n raised to the powerof the constant (–2.5), or n -2.5 . For the Iraqi insurgency the exponentwas found to be –2.3, indicating more fatalities for each type of eventcompared to similar ones outside Iraq. Yet Johnson and his associatesfound that over time the Iraqi exponent appeared to be convergingwith the constant of –2.5 found for events outside Iraq. Thus, thenumber of conflicts causing 10 fatalities would be equal to the averagenumber of conflicts times 10 -2.5 while the number of conflictswith 20 fatalities would be proportional to 20 -2.5 .Earlier in 2006 University of New Mexico researchers Aaron Clausetand Maxwell Young, in their paper “Scale Invariance in GlobalTerrorism” (published as physics/0502012 at http://xx.lanl.gov), alsohad found a power law relationship for the period from 1968 to thepresent between fatalities from acts of terrorism and numbers of suchevents but found different exponents describing that relationship forG7 nations and the relationship for events within non-G7 nations.This indicated that the numbers of attacks within developed nationstended to be fewer but also much more lethal than attacks occurring indeveloping nations. Clauset and Young also found that from 1989 onwardthese two power laws have been converging to a common power