The distribution of violent events and interevent times in conflicts

Abstract: Violent conflicts are interrupted by intervals without violence. Interevent times are said have a power law distribution, but this is only true for coarse grained data, typically with a maximal resolution of a single day. For fine grained data, with a resolution of seconds or shorter, the distribution is lognormal. By representing conflicts as a multiplicative process, it becomes clear why these two different distributions are found.