Throughout history unfortunate war events have been documented. Despite the fact that their duration as well as their determinants differ, the main results of wars are essentially the same: material and human destruction. Regardless of this negative outcome, it is important to study them because they have transformed our society and succeeded establishing in some cases a new social, economic and political order.
This paper studies the duration of wars and it establishes a new conjecture in which information flows through the social structure of war determine its duration. This means that irregular wars change the underlying social structures, blocking informational cascades about its outcome, while preventing the creation of wining coalitions.
The document studies the following:
war and uncertainty
information and net-wars
non-expanding information cascades
loss of connectedness, among others
The article concludes that social networks are information haulers and within an irregular war they become the stage in which the real, daily battles are fought. At the same time, it states that irregular wars may endure forever because in them alliances are not established.
