| A generalized fission-fusion model for the frequency of severe terrorist attacks (2009) | |||||||||
Abstract | |||||||||
| We present and analyze a model of the frequency of severe terrorist attacks, which generalizes the recently proposed model of Johnson et al. This model, which is based on the notion of self-organization criticality and which describes how terrorist cells might merge and disintegrate over time, predicts that the distribution of attack severities should follow a power-law form with an exponent of alpha=5/2. This prediction is in good agreement with current empirical estimates for terrorist attacks worldwide, which give alpha=2.4 \pm 0.2, and is independent of certain details of the model, i.e., the model shows universality.. Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure, 3 appendices | |||||||||
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