What We Can Know about the Future of War and Its Humanitarian Impacts?

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Armed conflicts have detrimental and long-lasting impacts on a range of societal dimensions, including food security, health, economic growth, and political institutions. In an effort to prevent and mitigate the disastrous impacts of violence, humanitarian and development actors are increasingly shifting away from reactive policies and towards anticipatory, prevention-driven strategies. Anticipatory actions and humanitarian efforts could greatly benefit from early warning systems that accurately forecast the risk of armed conflicts and their expected impacts on societies. However, existing early warning systems and prediction efforts largely focus on the incidence, onset, or intensity of conflicts, while attempts to predict the humanitarian impacts of violence remain sparse. Moreover, forecasts of conflicts and their impacts are, by their very nature, uncertain. Prediction uncertainty may be epistemic, such as the one stemming from missing or limited data, or aleatoric and related to the stochastic aspects inherent in conflicts. Despite recent progresses in predicting conflicts, the magnitude, causes, and implications of uncertainty in conflict forecasting remain under-researched, thus potentially leading to overly optimistic or pessimistic predictions, and obscuring policy-makers and stakeholders’ understanding of the forecasts.
This panel attempts to fill both gaps by presenting theoretical and methodological advances to 1) identify, measure, and address conflict prediction uncertainty, and 2) forecast the impacts of armed conflicts on different sectors of societies and dimensions of human development. The papers introduce innovative approaches, such as conformal predictions and matrix profiles, to enhance our collective understanding and representation of uncertainty in conflict forecasts, identify recurrent patterns in armed conflicts, and improve our ability to predict how different segments of society are affected by violence. By enhancing our collective knowledge on what we know about the future of war and its humanitarian impacts, the results of these studies not only contribute to the academic literature on political forecasting, but also improve the policy relevance of existing early warning systems.

Sub Unit

• Related Groups / Political Forecasting Group

Individual Presentations

• Conformal Prediction of Armed Conflict - David Randahl, Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University; Jonathan P Williams, NC State University; Håvard Hegre, Peace Research Institute Oslo

• Identifying Motifs and Patterns in War Fatalities: A Matrix Profile Application - Thomas Schincariol, Trinity College Dublin; Paola Vesco, Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO); Thomas Chadefaux, Trinity College Dublin; Bear F. Braumoeller, Ohio State University

• Forecasting Armed Conflict in a Complex System of Instability - Vito D'Orazio, West Virginia University

• Forecasting the Fallout: Anticipating the Humanitarian Impact of Armed Conflict - Simon Polichinel von der Maase, Peace Research Institute Oslo

• Can an Eye for an Eye Turn the Whole World Sanctioned? - Khrystyna Holynska, Pardee RAND Graduate School; C. Ben Gibson; Renato Corbetta, University of Alabama, Birmingham

Chair

• Håvard Hegre Peace Research Institute Oslo

Discussants

• Michael P. Colaresi University of Pittsburgh

• Renato Corbetta University of Alabama, Birmingham