Predicting Insurgent Attacks with a Mathematical Model

December 17, 2009 — When bombs and bullets left 37 dead during Friday prayers at a mosque in Pakistan, earlier this month, the insurgency was using the element of surprise. Unpredictability is the hallmark of modern insurgent attacks such as this one. However, the likelihood of such events, their timing and strength can now be estimated and managed before occurring, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Miami. The study entitled 'Common Ecology Quantifies Human Insurgency' is featured as the cover of the December 17, 2009 issue of the scientific journal Nature. The University of Miami (UM) researchers and their collaborators analyzed the size and timing of 54,679 violent events reported in Afghanistan, Colombia, Indonesia, Iraq, Israel, Northern Ireland, Peru, Senegal and Sierra Leone. The findings show that there is a generic way in which humans carry out insurgency and terrorism when faced by a large powerful state force, and this is irrespective of background history, motivation, ideology, politics and location, explains Neil Johnson, principal investigator of the study and professor of Physics at the UM College of Arts and Sciences. 'We have found a unified model of modern insurgent wars that shows a fundamental pattern in the apparent chaos of wars,' says Johnson.