I present a unified discussion of several recently published results concerning the escalation, timing and severity of violent events in human conflicts and global terrorism, and set them in the wider context of real-world and cyber-based collective violence and illicit activity. I point out how...

It is still unknown whether there is some deep structure to modern wars and terrorist campaigns that could allow reliable prediction of future patterns of violent events. Recent war research focuses on size distributions of violent events, with size defined by the number of people killed in each...