Introducing A New Venue for Atrocities Early Warning

Starting today, the bits of this blog on forecasting and monitoring mass atrocities are moving to their proper home, or at least the initial makings of it. Say hi to the (interim) blog of the Early Warning Project.

Since 2012, I have been working as a consultant to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for the Prevention of Genocide (CPG) to help build a new global early-warning system for mass atrocities. As usual, that process is taking longer than we had expected. We now have working versions of the project’s two main forecasting streams—statistical risk assessments and a “wisdom of (expert) crowds” system called an opinion pool—and CPG has hired a full-time staffer (hi, Ali) to manage their day-to-day workings. Unfortunately, though, the web site that will present, discuss, and invite discussion of those forecasts is still under construction. Thanks to Dartmouth’s DALI Lab, we’ve got a great prototype, but there’s finishing work to be done, and doing it takes a while.

Well, delays, be damned. We think the content we’re producing is useful now, so we’re not waiting for that site to get finished to start sharing it. Instead, we’re launching this interim blog to go ahead and start doing things like:

Post updates to our statistical risk assessments;
Share and discuss forecasts from our opinion pool;
Take deeper looks at specific cases, like Rwanda and Iraq; and
Invite and share guest posts from the wider community of people working on these issues.

When the project’s full-blown web site finally goes up, it will feature a blog, too, and all of the content from this interim venue will migrate there. Until then, if you’re interested in atrocities early warning and prevention—or applied forecasting more generally—please come see what we’re doing, share what you find interesting, and help us think about how to do it even better.

Meanwhile, Dart-Throwing Chimp will keep plugging along on its core themes of democratization, political instability, and forecasting. If you’ve got the interest and the bandwidth, I hope you’ll find time to watch and engage with both channels.