A complex network analysis of ethnic conflicts and human rights violations

Abstract News reports in media contain records of a wide range of socio-economic and political events in time. Using a publicly available, large digital database of news records, and aggregating them over time, we study the network of ethnic conflicts and human rights violations. Complex network ana...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Kiran Sharma, Gunjan Sehgal, Bindu Gupta, Geetika Sharma, Arnab Chatterjee, Anirban Chakraborti, Gautam Shroff
Format: article
Language:EN
Published: Nature Portfolio 2017
Subjects:
R
Q
Online Access:https://doaj.org/article/d6013f3d9297444bb20f764e534e3088
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Abstract News reports in media contain records of a wide range of socio-economic and political events in time. Using a publicly available, large digital database of news records, and aggregating them over time, we study the network of ethnic conflicts and human rights violations. Complex network analyses of the events and the involved actors provide important insights on the engaging actors, groups, establishments and sometimes nations, pointing at their long range effect over space and time. We find power law decays in distributions of actor mentions, co-actor mentions and degrees and dominance of influential actors and groups. Most influential actors or groups form a giant connected component which grows in time, and is expected to encompass all actors globally in the long run. We demonstrate how targeted removal of actors may help stop spreading unruly events. We study the cause-effect relation between types of events, and our quantitative analysis confirm that ethnic conflicts lead to human rights violations, while it does not support the converse.