All posts tagged Pakistan

Early Results from a New Atrocities Early Warning System

For the past couple of years, I have been working as a consultant to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for the Prevention of Genocide to help build a new early-warning system for mass atrocities around the world. Six months ago, we started running the second of our two major forecasting streams, a “wisdom of (expert) crowds” platform that aggregates probabilistic forecasts from a pool of topical and area experts on potential events of concern. (See this conference paper for more detail.)

The chart below summarizes the output from that platform on most of the questions we’ve asked so far about potential new episodes of mass killing before 2015. For our early-warning system, we define a mass killing as an episode of sustained violence in which at least 1,000 noncombatant civilians from a discrete group are intentionally killed, usually in a period of a year or less. Each line in the chart shows change over time in the daily average of the inputs from all of the participants who choose to make a forecast on that question. In other words, the line is a mathematical summary of the wisdom of our assembled crowd—now numbering nearly 100—on the risk of a mass killing beginning in each case before the end of 2014. Also:

Some of the lines (e.g., South Sudan, Iraq, Pakistan) start further to the right than others because we did not ask about those cases when the system launched but instead added them later, as we continue to do.
Two lines—Central African Republic and South Sudan—end early because we saw onsets of mass-killing episodes in those countries. The asterisks indicate the dates on which we made those declarations and therefore closed the relevant questions.
Most but not all of these questions ask specifically about state-led mass killings, and some focus on specific target groups (e.g., the Rohingya in Burma) or geographic regions (the North Caucasus in Russia) as indicated.

Crowd-Estimated Probabilities of Mass-Killing Onset Before 1 January 2015

I look at that chart and conclude that this process is working reasonably well so far. In the six months since we started running this system, the two countries that have seen onsets of mass killing are both ones that our forecasters promptly and consistently put on the high side of 50 percent. Nearly all of the other cases, where mass killings haven’t yet occurred this year, have stuck on the low end of the scale.

I’m also gratified to see that the system is already generating the kind of dynamic output we’d hoped it would, even with fewer than 100 forecasters in the pool. In the past several weeks, the forecasts for both Burma and Iraq have risen sharply, apparently in response to shifts in relevant policies in the former and the escalation of the civil war in the latter. Meanwhile, the forecast for Uighurs in China has risen steadily over the year as a separatist rebellion in Xinjiang Province has escalated and, with it, concerns about a harsh government response. These inflection points and trends can help identify changes in risk that warrant attention from organizations and individuals concerned about preventing or mitigating these potential atrocities.

Finally, I’m also intrigued to see that our opinion pool seems to be sorting cases into a few clusters that could be construed as distinct tiers of concern. Here’s what I have in mind:

Above the 50-percent threshold are the high risk cases, where forecasters assess that mass killing is likely to occur during the specified time frame. These cases won’t necessarily be surprising. Some observers had been warning on the risk of mass atrocities in CAR and South Sudan for months before those episodes began, and the plight of the Rohingya in Burma has been a focal point for many advocacy groups in the past year. Even in supposedly “obvious” cases, however, this system can help by providing a sharper estimate of that risk and giving a sense of how it is trending over time. In the case of Burma, for example, it is the separation that has happened in the last several weeks that tells the story of a switch from possible to likely and thus adds a degree of urgency to that warning.
A little farther down the y-axis are the moderate risk cases—ones that probably won’t suffer mass killing during the period in question but could more readily tip in that direction. In the chart above, Iraq, Sudan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Burundi all land in this tier, although Iraq now appears to be sliding into the high risk group.
Clustered toward the bottom are the low risk cases where the forecasters seem fairly confident that mass killing will not occur in the near future. In the chart above, Russia, Afghanistan, and Ethiopia are the cases that land firmly in this set. China (Uighurs) remains closer to them than the moderate risk tier, but it appears to be creeping toward the moderate-risk group. We are also running a question about the risk of state-led mass killing in Rwanda before 2015, and it currently lands in this tier, with a forecast of 14 percent.

The system that generates the data behind this chart is password protected, but the point of our project is to make these kinds of forecasts freely available to the global public. We are currently building the web site that will display the forecasts from this opinion pool in real time to all comers and hope to have it ready this fall.

In the meantime, if you think you have relevant knowledge or expertise—maybe you study or work on this topic, or maybe you live or work in parts of the world where risks tend to be higher—and are interested in volunteering as a forecaster, please send an email to us at ewp@ushmm.org.

3 Comments

by Jay Ulfelder on May 19, 2014 • Permalink

Posted in Forecasting, Mass Atrocities

Tagged Afghanistan, Bangladesh, burma, Burundi, Center for the Prevention of Genocide, Central African Republic, China, Ethiopia, Holocaust Museum, Inkling, Iraq, Myanmar, Pakistan, Russia, Rwanda, South Sudan, Sudan

Posted by Jay Ulfelder on May 19, 2014

https://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2014/05/19/early-results-from-a-new-atrocities-early-warning-system/

A Notable Year of the Wrong Kind

The year that’s about to end has distinguished itself in at least one way we’d prefer never to see again. By my reckoning, 2013 saw more new mass killings than any year since the early 1990s.

When I say “mass killing,” I mean any episode in which the deliberate actions of state agents or other organizations kill at least 1,000 noncombatant civilians from a discrete group. Mass killings are often but certainly not always perpetrated by states, and the groups they target may be identified in various ways, from their politics to their ethnicity, language, or religion. Thanks to my colleague Ben Valentino, we have a fairly reliable tally of episodes of state-led mass killing around the world since the mid-1940s. Unfortunately, there is no comparable reckoning of mass killings carried out by non-state actors—nearly always rebel groups of some kind—so we can’t make statements about counts and trends as confidently as I would like. Still, we do the best we can with the information we have.

With those definitions and caveats in mind, I would say that in 2013 mass killings began:

In Egypt, where state security forces followed their July coup with massacres of nonviolent protesters and an increasingly brutal counterinsurgency campaign in the Sinai;
In Nigeria, where the military is flailing about in its so-far-unsuccessful efforts to quell Boko Haram’s vicious rebellion, a mass killing in its own right;
In the Central African Republic, where, having finally toppled a president whose writ had been something of a fiction anyway, Séléka rebels engaged in widespread marauding that set off a downward spiral of retributory murders by the remnants of Séléka and the anti-balaka militias that have mobilized in response to them;
And now probably in South Sudan, where a long-running political rivalry boiled over again this month in a mutiny-cum-coup attempt that has apparently sparked “mass extrajudicial killings“, the scope of which remains unknown, in part because they continue as I write.

Of course, even as these new cases have developed, episodes of mass killings have continued in a number of other places:

In Syria, where state forces and militias allied with them continue to use indiscriminate violence on a grand and horrible scale in their efforts to quash the rebellion that began there in 2011 (and, as is the case in many civil wars, where those rebels sometimes commit atrocities of their own);
In Sudan, where the uncertainty is not whether the regime is engaging in mass killing but in how many parts of the country at once and targeting how many different groups;
In Iraq, where the resumption of the civil war that never really ended has probably killed more than 8,000 people in 2013 alone, many of them noncombatants who happened to be in the wrong place when a car bomb or suicide vest went off;
In Afghanistan, where civilian casualties accelerated in the first half of 2013 (and probably the second), including “women and children [who] were being killed by [the Taliban’s] roadside bombs almost daily”;
In the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where a hodge-podge of local and regional conflicts have displaced hundreds of thousands and killed a significant fraction thereof in incidents like this one just reported today;
In Mexico, where the death toll from “criminal insurgency” has already outstripped the tally from many civil wars of the past half-century;
In Pakistan, where sectarian violence seems to have escalated again this year beyond its recently miserable levels;
In Myanmar, where civilians in several mountainous states remain stuck in the middle of a decades-old fight between local militias and the state’s armed forces, which have occasionally used scorched-earth tactics in their failed efforts to defeat the insurgents (see here and here);
And in North Korea, where policy-induced famines and a sprawling system of prison camps continue to kill unknown but almost certainly large numbers of civilians each year.

In a follow-up post I hope to write soon, I’ll offer some ideas on why 2013 was such a bad year for deliberate mass violence against civilians. In the meantime, if you think I’ve misrepresented any of these cases here or overlooked any others, please use the Comments to set me straight.