Anticipating Civil Wars

A system that measures the level of conflict within countries may give forecasters early warning signals of when a nation is approaching civil war, according to experts at Harvard University and Ohio State University. The "conflict barometer" processes the raw material of unrest: thousands of Reuters news stories. Each day's accumulated news reports are classified by a high-speed sentence-analyzing program into about 200 categories. "This task had to be automated because humans cannot keep pace with the reports," notes Doug Bond, a Harvard researcher. Bond and Craig Jenkins, a political sociologist at Ohio State, then calculate the proportions of events related to three critical indicators of instability: civil protests, repressive government actions, and outbreaks of violence. The resulting "conflict carrying capacity" score (CCC) can yield Valuable clues to the political future of particular nations. A score of 100 indicates stability, while 0 means chaos. Before September 11, 2001, the United States usually scored about 98, Great Britain in the 90s, and Sri Lanka at 60 or below. Conflict carrying capacity scores over a decade reveal that the barometer provided six to nine months' advance warning of civil wars that erupted in Algeria and Sri Lanka; the scores also forecast Peru's return to stability after a period of civil unrest. As a country draws closer to chaos, the indicators of violence, civil protest, and government repression rise and stay at high levels for months, keeping that nation's conflict carrying capacity below a score of about 85. "It looks like the gestation period of a crisis is six to nine months," reports Jenkins, who suggests that the conflict index in Afghanistan--measuring the duration and intensity of fighting there should be weighed when evaluating the risk that nations bordering Afghanistan might be destabilized. According to the index, Pakistan and Tajikistan are on the brink of instability. The conflict carrying capacity score is also a solid predictor of currency collapse, according to researcher John Freeman at the University of Minnesota; the Swiss Peace Foundation uses CCC scores to identify nations whose currencies are at risk. Source: The Journal of Conflict Resolution (Volume 45, page 3), Yale University, Department of Political Science, P.O. Box 208301, New Haven, Connecticut 06520. Web site www.sagepub.co.uk/

Originally published in the Mar-Apr 2002 issue of THE FUTURIST. Used with permission from the World Future Society, 7910 Woodmont Avenue, Suite 450, Bethesda, Maryland 20814. Telephone: 301/656-8274; Fax: 301/951-0394; http://www.wfs.org

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