Bird's Eye View to Indonesian Mass Conflict: Revisiting the Fact of Self-Organized Criticality

Abstract:     
The paper statistically observed the recorded data of the series of social clashes and violence in Ambon, Indonesia in the period of social conflict between 1999-2004. The scaling laws are revealed and the power-law fitting procedures and analysis are conducted. The results also reviewed some findings in wars among countries in the worlds now well known as Richardson's Law. The paper also discussed the plausible explanations in the sense of possible underlying process of the famous self-organized criticality by reviewing the classic forest fire model. Some further sociological explorations in the sense of computational and agent-based model approaches are also conjectured.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 12

Keywords: social clashes, social conflict and violence, power law distribution, Richardson's Law, self-organized criticality

working papers series