Analyzing Escalations in Militarized Interstate Disputes Using Motifs in Temporal Networks

We present a temporal network analysis of militarized interstate dispute (MID) data from 1992 to 2014. MIDs progress through a series of incidents, each ranging from threats to uses of military force by one state to another. We model these incidents as a temporal conflict network, where nodes denote states and directed edges denote incidents. We analyze temporal motifs or subgraphs in the conflict network to uncover the patterns by which different states engage in and escalate conflicts with each other. We find that different types of temporal motifs appear in the network depending on the time scale being considered (days to months) and the year of the conflict. The most frequent 3-edge temporal motifs at a 1-week time scale correspond to different variants of two states acting against a third state, potentially escalating the conflict. Temporal motifs with reciprocation, where a state acts in response to a previous incident, tend to occur only over longer time scales (e.g. months). We also find that both the network’s degree and temporal motif distributions are extremely heavy tailed, with a small number of states being involved in many conflicts.