2019: Are you Ready for a New World War? A Statistical Analysis

Detail from Picasso's "Guernica" - 1937

With the end of 2018, also the centennial of the end of the Great War (or WWI) is over. It passed remarkably in silence: a few celebrations, but little or no discussion of the reasons and the consequences of that war, supposed to be the one that would "end all wars." Of course, it was too much to expect that wars would ever end, but maybe we could have at least learned something from rethinking to a conflict that caused some 40 million victims for no evident purpose. But that didn't happen (if you can read Italian, you may be interested in a reflection of mine on the subject).

So, the world situation, today, looks more and more similar to the military build-up that took place in Europe in the years preceding the Great War. The Great Powers are arranging their forces as if they were setting their pieces on a giant chessboard. At some moment, someone may well decide to make the first move. And, in this giant chess game, the kings can wipe out all the pieces on the chessboard in a single move with their nuclear warheads.

It would be nice to follow Steven Pinker's optimism about modern times, supposed to have become less violent. There may be such a trend for the past few decades, but it is always dangerous to extrapolate from a limited dataset. In this case, the optimism of Pinker seems to be simply wrong if measured over a time span of several centuries. This is the result of an analysis of the data for the conflicts of the past 600 years that myself and my coworkers Martelloni and Di Patti performed in 2018 -- it was thought, in part, as a way to celebrate the centennial of the Great War.

Our results are mostly a confirmation of a series of analyses that was started by Lewis Fry Richardson, pacifist and polymath, who was the first to study wars trying to understand their statistical patterns. It is a field that today has grown and arrived at a number of conclusions, mainly that war is a statistical phenomenon largely independent from religions, ideologies, money, and great leaders. It is an "emergent phenomenon" of the complex network of interactions among human societies worldwide. There is some evidence that wars are becoming less frequent, but they are also becoming more deadly. There follows there is a chance of a major conflict in a non-remote future that could dwarf all past conflicts in terms of the destruction it could cause. On this point, see a recent paper by Aaron Clauset.

Unfortunately, the results of these studies are practically unknown beyond the small group of practitioners engaged in it and with every new war we repeat the mistakes of the Great War, thinking that a war could be a way to end wars -- it is something that was repeated as recently as with the 2003 invasion of Iraq. As usual, we are marching blindfolded into the future and the future may not be kind to those who don't understand it.

I have already reported some preliminary results of this study (also here, here, and here). Now you can read our complete paper on ArXiv, and here are some excerpts.

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Pattern Analysis of World Conflicts over the past 600 years

Gianluca Martelloni, Francesca Di Patti, Ugo Bardi

(excerpts from the complete paper)

We analyze the largest database available for violent conflicts, the one prepared by Brecke (Brecke 2011), covering some 600 years of human history. After normalizing the data for the global human population, we find that the number of casualties tends to follow a power law over the whole data series for the period considered, with no evidence of periodicity. We also observe that the number of conflicts, again normalized for the human population, show a decreasing trend as a function of time. Our results tend to support the idea that war is a statistical phenomenon related to the network structure of the human society.

Our contribution in this field consists in validating the Brecke conflict database (Brecke 2011)⁠, among the longest and most complete ones available. This analysis confirms previous work, see e.g. (Clauset 2018)⁠ , (Clauset and Gleditsch 2018)⁠ for a general discussion. The data indicate that power laws are common in the distribution of violent conflicts in human history – in this case, the trend is clear when the number of casualties is normalized for the increasing world population. Note also that the normalized number of conflicts per year tend to decrease with time – this result indicates that in modern times war have tended to become less frequent, but more destructive. In practice, these results confirm that there is little evidence supporting the idea popularized by Pinker (Pinker 2011)⁠ that humankind is progressing toward a more peaceful world. A new major conflict might be possible in a non-remote future, as discussed among others by Clauset (Clauset 2018)⁠. These results seem to indicate that human conflicts are a critical phenomenon: we could say that humans worldwide tend to form societies existing in a self-organized critical condition, as defined by Bak et al. (Per Bak, Tang, and Wiesenfeld 1988)⁠. In these conditions, war is simply one of the methods that the system has to dissipate entropy at the fastest possible speed (Kleidon, Malhi, and Cox 2010)⁠,(Trinn 2018)⁠. In other words, war appears to be an unavoidable consequence of the behavior of human beings, and perhaps of other primate species (de Waal 2000)⁠.

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Will we Ever be Able to End Wars? How the Wise are Confused

One hundred years after the end of the war that was to end all wars, the First World War, we still don't understand what wars are, why we fight wars, why we can't stop fighting them. We are surrounded, it seems, by things we don't understand: why do people fight wars? Why are wars so commmon? Why can't we find a way to stop them? Why people still fall for the most obvious propaganda tricks?

Below, you can find an excerpt from the 1980 book by David Wilkinson, "Deadly Quarrels" that starts with a list of the various theories put forward in modern times to explain how peace could be attained. Still perfectly valid today, the list highlights the confusion pervading the attempts to put an end to war. It reminds the 200+ theories that Demandt reports for the reasons of the fall of the Roman Empire. More than that, it reminds of Paul of Tarsus (Corinthians 1) when he says "God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise." And this is war, a foolish thing that keep confounding us.

From "Deadly Quarrels" by David Wilkinson, 1980 (*)

The most common way of contributing to the debate over war causation and peace strategy has been to assert some definite theory, to show how it fits current circumstances, and to deduce immediate practical conclusions. If we follow this public debate, we may expect to be told that war is a consequence, for instance, of wickedness, lawlessness, alienation, aggressive regimes, imperialism, poverty, militarism, anarchy, or weakness. Seldom will any evidence be offered. Instead the writer is likely to present a peace strategy that matches his theory of war causation. We shall therefore learn that we can have:

• Peace through morality. Peace (local and global) can be brought about by a moral appeal, through world public opinion, to leaders and peoples not to condone or practice violence, aggression, or war, but to shun and to denounce them.
• Peace through law. Peace can be made by signing international treaties and creating international laws that will regulate conduct and by resorting to international courts to solve disputes.
• Peace through negotiation. Peace can be maintained by frank discussion of differences, by open diplomacy, by international conferences and assemblies that will air grievances and, through candor and goodwill, arrive at a harmonious consensus.
• Peace through political reform. Peace can be established by setting up regimes of a nonaggressive type throughout the world: republics rather than monarchies; democratic rather than oligarchic republics; constitutionally limited rather than arbitrary, autocratic regimes.
• Peace through national liberation. Peace can be instituted only through the worldwide triumph of nationalism. Multinational empires must be dissolved into nation-states; every nation must have its own sovereign, independent government and all its own national territory, but no more.
• Peace through prosperity. Peace requires the worldwide triumph of an economic order that will produce universal prosperity and thereby remove the incentive to fight. Some consider this order to be one of universal capitalism, or at least of worldwide free trade; others hold it to be some species of socialism, reformist or revolutionary, elitist or democratic.
• Peace through disarmament. Peace can be established by reducing and eventually eliminating weapons, bases, and armies, by removing the means to make war.
• Peace through international organization. Peace can be established by creating a world political organization, perhaps even a constitutional world government resembling national governments, to enforce order and promote progress throughout the world.
• Peace through power. Peace can be maintained by the peaceable accumulation of forces, perhaps overwhelming, perhaps preponderant or balancing or adequate-sufficient to deter, defeat, or punish aggression.

Much current talk on war and peace amounts to no more than high-handed assertions that my chosen theory is right, and all others therefore are evidently wrong.




(*) Wilkinson's "Deadly Quarrels" is a discussion of the studies performed by Lewis Fry Richardson from the 1930s to his death in 1953. Richardson was one of the first researchers who tried to put forward a quantitative theory of war. With my coworkers Gianluca Martelloni and Francesca Di Patti, we are re-examining the statistical patterns of war. We are finding, unfortunately, that Richardosn was basically right: wars are a random phenomenon similar to earthquakes and avalanches -- very hard both to predict and to stop. 

One Hundred Years Ago: the end of the war that should have ended all wars.

The front cover of the book I published this year dedicated to the memory of a forgotten hero of the Great War, Armando Vacca. He fought for peace as much as he could, to the point that he had to give his life for a cause he had fought against. He died as a martyr for his Christian faith on the Carso mountains on July 21st, 1915.

One Hundred years ago, on Nov 4th, 1918, the Great War, also known as the First World War, ended for Italy with Austria-Hungary surrendering. The war would last a few more days on the Western front. I think it is appropriate to celebrate this day with some words of a beautiful song by Eric Bogle, "The Green Fields of France."

Ah, young Willie McBride, I can't help wonder why
Do those that lie here know why did they die
And did they believe when they answered the call
Did they really believe that this war would end war?

For the sorrow, the suffering, the glory, the pain
The killing, and the dying was all done in vain...
For, young Willie McBride, it all happened again
And again, and again, and again, and again

Eric Bogle – “The Green Fields of France”

The Great War and the rise of propaganda

The Great War started one hundred years ago, on July 28, 1914. It was later known as the first world war, but the term "Great War" better conveys the enormity of something that had never happened before in human history. Here I propose an interpretation of the war based on the emergent properties of complex systems: the triumph of propaganda.

One hundred years after the start of the Great War, we are still struggling to understand what caused Europeans to decide that it was a good idea to kill each other by the millions while staying in humid and lice infested trenches. Political and economic factors are often mentioned, but are hardly sufficient. Wars have been around from the beginning of human history, but had never reached the size and the level of ferocity of the Great War.

What made the Great War so destructive was the power of what was later called "propaganda" (and which today we tend to call "consensus building"). In turn, propaganda was a classic case of an emergent phenomenon of complex systems. It was an unexpected result of the diffusion of literacy in industrialized countries. As an example, by the end of the 19th century, France had achieved a nearly 100% degree of literacy in its population  (image below from Wikipedia). Several European countries, including Germany, Britain, and others, had reached similar rates.

People were taught to read and write because literacy was a useful ability in a rapidly industrializing society. But, for literacy, just as for many other things, there holds the law of unexpected consequences. Once most people were able to read and write, the rules of the game of communication changed completely. Before the age of literacy, governments had to rely on town criers screaming "hear ye, hear ye!" in order to tell their subjects that a war had been declared and that they had to enlist in the army. With literacy, people would read newspapers and were told not only that they had to enlist, but how good and beautiful it was to enlist to fight against the evil monsters that the enemies were.


In a classic case of reinforcing feedback, propaganda fed on itself. As people became more and more convinced to be on the side of good against evil, the war became harsher and more out of control, generating more hate and more propaganda. In part, this disastrous spiral was a spontaneous phenomenon, but soon governments learned how to exploit it. It took some time to develop the right techniques, but we can pinpoint the beginning of modern war propaganda methods with the sinking of the British ship "Lusitania" by a German submarine in 1915. Allied propaganda exploited the sinking in ways which we can easily recognize as a standard part of "false flag" operations: the extensive use of the media to demonize the enemy. These technologies are still commonly used today and are perhaps more effective than ever.

Today, images and movies are used to complement and replace the written world of a century ago, but the basic mechanism of propaganda remains the same: governments can reach their subjects with a tremendous barrage of false or distorted information. People are not normally equipped to defend themselves from this onrush of disinformation and tend to react either believing in it or taking refuge in bizarre conspiracy theories - often manufactured as part of more false flag propaganda operations.

The emergent phenomenon of propaganda during the Great War took most people by surprise and, after the war was over, there were several attempts to understand it and - if possible - control it. Edward Bernays was a pioneer in this field with his 1928 book "Propaganda". He was an optimist and thought that propaganda could be used for good purposes. Unfortunately, it is nearly impossible to control a self-reinforcing phenomenon and today we are as sensitive as a hundred years ago to the waves of hate which periodically engulf the public opinion. The case of the non-existing "Weapons of Mass Destruction" which led to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 is the most recent full size manifestation of this phenomenon. Others may be in the making right now.

So, a hundred years later, the story of the Great War is a lesson on how difficult it is for us to manage complex systems. Our society, one of the most complex systems that ever existed in human history, is subjected to destructive transitions created by emergent control phenomena which appear out of nowhere: unpredictable and uncontrollable. Propaganda feeds on itself and creates waves of hate which generate destructive wars. The illusory perception of abundance of oil and gas created by fracking leads to the diversion of immense amounts of resources to a task which is leading us nowhere. Waves of self-reinforcing optimism in the media lead to financial bubbles and then to destructive crashes, as it happened in 2008 and may happen again.

The war propaganda of one century ago looks to us hopelessly naive. But the core ideas developed at the time of the Great War are still with us, although often in subtler and more effective forms. The diffusion of the Internet is adding layers and layers of complexity to the once simple mechanisms of propaganda and the fragmentation of the infosphere makes it even more difficult to control it. Never in history, we have faced such an incredibly complex system which is shaping our perception of the world. The infosphere is quickly becoming a game of mirrors where multiple images of the same thing scream at each other "I am the real one".

Where is it all leading us? We don't know, we cannot know. The future, as usual, is a dim reflection of the past. So, the Great War is part of our past, but also of our future. With its more than 10 million deaths and with its incredible mix of love and hate, it is still part of the way we are, part of the way we see the world, part of the way we react to the unknown, to the mysterious essence of the universe.


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These words by Olaf Stapledon (last and first men) may give us a hint of what we are facing.


Great are the stars, and man is of no account to them. But man is a fair spirit, whom a star conceived and a star kills. He is greater than those bright blind companies. For though in them there is incalculable potentiality, in him there is achievement, small, but actual. Too soon, seemingly, he comes to his end. But when he is done he will not be nothing, not as though he had never been; for he is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things.

Man was winged hopefully. He had in him to go further than this short flight, now ending. He proposed even that he should become the Flower of All Things, and that he should learn to be the All–Knowing, the All–Admiring. Instead, he is to be destroyed. He is only a fledgling caught in a bush-fire. He is very small, very simple, very little capable of insight. His knowledge of the great orb of things is but a fledgling’s knowledge. His admiration is a nestling’s admiration for the things kindly to his own small nature. He delights only in food and the food-announcing call. The music of the spheres passes over him, through him, and is not heard.

Yet it has used him. And now it uses his destruction. Great, and terrible, and very beautiful is the Whole; and for man the best is that the Whole should use him.

But does it really use him? Is the beauty of the Whole really enhanced by our agony? And is the Whole really beautiful? And what is beauty? Throughout all his existence man has been striving to hear the music of the spheres, and has seemed to himself once and again to catch some phrase of it, or even a hint of the whole form of it. Yet he can never be sure that he has truly heard it, nor even that there is any such perfect music at all to be heard. Inevitably so, for if it exists, it is not for him in his littleness.