Claudio Cioffi-Revilla, in his study of very long-range cross-cultural occurrences of war in human societies, has postulated a tri-causal theory of historical forces that produce war: Anarchy (the prevailing and relatively constant factor of a Hobbesian state of nature or absence of government above nations or groups), stability (formation of alliances, international law, various consensual regimes among nations or groups), and escalation (particular factors of economic, national, religious or political differences that cause friction between groups or nations).

Anarchy is a very long-range persisting condition pre-disposing toward war; stability is a middle-range factor that can fluctuate; it tends to mitigate the tendency toward war; and escalation is a short-range force that may precipitate war if the background factors permit. (The analysis could be continued, in a fractal manner, to even shorter time ranges: if the escalation forces of, say, nationalism are now considered as the background, fear of war or its consequences [deterrence] could be the restraining force, and particular precipitating incidents like the assassination of the heir to the Habsburg throne could be the immediate cause. Or referring to the previous essay “Conflict Stages and Appropriate Solutions”, nationalism would correspond to the “long-range” [everything is relative!] grievances, followed by shorter-range disputes, followed by incidents precipitating a crisis. But we are not concerned with all that here.)

In Cioffi-Revilla’s formulation of the three factors, the tendency toward war is determined by an equation in which, on the right-hand side, in an additive manner, the three terms are: anarchy as represented by a constant, stability represented by s/t where s is a constant and t is time (i.e. stability decreases the frequency of war), and escalation is represented by a constant times an exponential in t (war probability increases rapidly in the presence of strong escalating forces).

F(t) = a + s/t + r.e(exp t)

I wonder what would happen if this equation was modified to fit catastrophe theory with 3 independent variables, which would define a swallowtail catastrophe. (Cioffi-Revilla himself had previously employed catastrophy theory in modelling war, but he seems to have abandoned this approach.)