Can we Predict Genocide? Forecasting Mass Atrocities

Atrocity Forecasting Project:

National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of OtagoUniversity of SydneyUniversity of New South Wales

What is Genocide? • A contested term:• UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide

(1948):• “The convention defines genocide as any of a number of acts committed

with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about it’s physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

• More recently: Political Instability Task Force (2010):• “Genocide and politicide events involve the promotion, execution, and/or

implied consent of sustained policies by governing elites or their agents - or in the case of civil war, either of the contending authorities - that result in the deaths of a substantial portion of a communal group or politicized non-communal group. In genocides the victimized groups are defined primarily in terms of their communal (ethnolinguistic, religious) characteristics. In politicides, by contrast, groups are defined primarily in terms of their political opposition to the regime and dominant groups (Marshall, Gurr, and Harff, 2010: 14).”

Genocide and Mass Killing – Historical• By PITF definition 45 cases of geno/politicide from 1946-2011

Uses of Genocide Forecasts• Forecasts for prevention• States have limited resources and prevention efforts need time to

work.• Prevention strategies need to be tailored to at-risk groups and states

• Forecasts for Intervention• Ignoring genocide is costly. MONUC is the largest and most

expensive peacekeeping mission to date. Conflict in the DRC is directly linked to the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

• Sanctions and intervention can work• “Naming and shaming also works”• Forecasts would help us ‘where to look’ – especially in collaboration

with other projects such as the Satellite Sentinel project. • Information Gathering, Plausible Deniability

• Forecasts for Prosecution

Our Aim at the Atrocity Forecasting Project• To provide a (relatively) accurate register of states at risk of

genocide every year.• Forecasting is using what we know about relationships in the past to

make predictions about the future.• But we used statistical methods to try to do this ‘rigorously’.• Actually had to produce two forecasts:

• One for ‘serious political instability’ and one for ‘genocide/politicide’.• Because mass-killing (since world war 2) almost always occurs in the

context of an ongoing violent conflict:• Civil Wars (Guatemala in the 1980s)• Ethnic Wars (Rwanda from early 1990s)• Coups (Idi Amin in Uganda)

Violent Political Instability

Genocide

No Genocide

Very Low Probability of Genocide

Forecasting Method• For each year we first predicted the probability of violent political

instability with:• Past Instability• Political and Economic Characteristics:

• Regime Type, Infant Mortality Rates, Past Discrimination, Population• Time Varying Factors

• Assassinations, Neighboring countries in conflict, Elections in Divided Countries

• Then we used this ‘probability of instability’ variable in a second model to predict genocide that also included:• Past Genocide Episodes• Political and Economic Characteristics:

• Constraints upon the executive and the ‘human defense burden’, Infant Mortality, Trade, Relevant ethnic divisions

• Time Varying Factors• Assassinations, Election Periods, Guerrilla warfare

• This allows us to make a prediction for every country for every year

How do we know if it is any good?

• First used statistical methods to build a model of what influences instability and genocide from 1974-1987.

• Then we used this model to ‘predict’ genocides from 1988-2003.• We got 82% of new genocide onsets correct and 79% of years

with no genocide onsets correct. • In another test, we correctly classified 7 out of 11 new genocides

when predicting one-year into the future for each year from 1988-2003 in the top 5% of cases.

• What does this look like?• http://sydney.edu.au/arts/research/atrocity_forecasting/

model/model_predictors.shtml • http://sydney.edu.au/arts/research/atrocity_forecasting/

model/model_slideshows.shtml

Forecasting into the ‘future future’.• Made 5 year forecasts for the 2011-2015 period based on

data from 1974-2010. • So, what ‘caused’ (or was correlated with) genocide from

1974-2010 and based on this knowledge, what would we predict for 2011 – 2015?

Genocide Forecasts 2011-2015

http://sydney.edu.au/arts/research/atrocity_forecasting/forecasts/monitoring.shtml

Economics and Genocide• Some important economic variables in our model:• Infant mortality• ‘Human Defence Burden’• Trade• Plus anything that is also correlated with the likelihood of civil

wars, etc.• Some variables were not important• Economic downturn

• Some variables have been shown important in recent studies but not tested for forecasting ability• Oil production• Onshore diamond depoisits• Interactions between economic downturn and institutional

capacity