among civilians regarding micro properties that driven the clashing individuals or social
groups and identities.
4. Closing Remarks
We show the scaling properties in the empirical data of social conflict occurred in
Indonesia, i.e.: series of social clashes in Maluku, Ambon that was probably one of the most
frightening social circumstances recently in the country. We also fit the distribution of the
sizes of the conflict measured by the numbers of the casualties in the recorded series of the
massive contacts between 1999 until 2004. The discussion has brought us to observe some
interesting statistical features depicted from the fitting process. As the power law
distribution reminds us to the classical work known today as Richardson’s Law, we review
the plausibility to see the social clashes in the terms of self-organized criticality.
Furthermore, the discussions distinguish the model that could be used to explain wars in the
world with those driven by social motives and organically spreading clashes leading to
massive violence.
The paper reviews the further the classic model of forest fire that can be used as an
intuitive analogy with the social clashes. However, it is worth to note and emphasize that
there is always a possibility that the underlying process is much more complex than the in
the forest fire model. The pioneered computational works incorporating agent based model
and the emergence of micro-macro linkage on this particular issue have also reviewed and
referred for more advanced and detailed description on explaining the social conflict and
civil violence altogether with the most important works on how to manage and thus inhibit
the spreading conflict or in the long term scientific endeavors for building the possible early
warning system for social clashes. Apparently this is left to the further challenging works in
computational sociology since this paper is modestly just giving glance of the bird’s eye view
of the social clashes occurred.
Acknowledgement
Both authors thank Surya Research International for the support.
Used Data are Compiled from:
Sala Wuku Foundation. URL: http://www.fica.org/hr
Tempo Magazine Online. URL: http:www.tempointeraktif.com
Lintas Peristiwa Kerusuhan di Maluku 1999 s/d 2001. Crisis Centre Keuskupan Ambonia. URL:
http:websitescrg.com/ambon/index.htm#/Articles
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