A few days ago, the Monkey Cage Blog ran a guest post by sociologist Amy Austin Holmes that wrestled with the question of why Egyptian security forces perpetrated a massacre in broad daylight at Rabaa a year ago. The Rabaa massacre is just one part of a larger episode of state-led mass killing that began in Egypt after the 2013 coup and continues today. As Holmes describes,
Ben Goldsmith is an associate professor of political science at the University of Sydney who studies international conflict, international public opinion, and U.S. foreign policy. In 2010, Ben began work on forecasting genocide and politicide. I first met him that year, in New Orleans at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association. We talked over lunch about statistical forecasting of rare and calamitous political events and have stayed in touch ever since. It's been great to see his project develop, and I'm glad to be able to spotlight it here.
Two recent reports released by Human Rights Watch offer further confirmation of episodes of state-led mass killing in Egypt and South Sudan, beginning in 2013. In our 2013 risk assessments, South Sudan and Egypt were ranked 4th and 6th, respectively, as countries most likely to experience state-led mass killing.
One of the first things I did as part of my work on the Early Warning Project was to scan the field and see who else around the world was doing what to assess risks of mass atrocities. That research led me to the Sentinel Project and its executive director, Christopher Tuckwood, whose work I continue to follow and admire. I recently emailed a few questions to Chris; here are his replies.
In a highly anticipated ruling, two former Khmer Rouge leaders have been found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life imprisonment by the tribunal established in Cambodia to try those most responsible for the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge betweeen 1975 and 1979.
The Early Warning Project does not try to assess risks of genocide. Instead, we assess risks of mass killing—a closely related but broader concept that covers all of the violent episodes that most observers would consider to be genocides, along with many others in which large numbers of civilians were deliberately killed.
This is the first in what we hope will be a long series of Q&A sessions with people doing interesting and important work on atrocities early warning or prevention. We thought it fitting to start the series with Ben Valentino, associate professor of government at Dartmouth College, who got the ball rolling on what would become the Early Warning Project while on a fellowship at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's Center for the Prevention of Genocide.
Advances in technology and the popularity of individuals like Nate Silver have given rise to the exciting idea that political scientists can predict the future using statistical models. Despite the recent attention forecasting has received, it is still difficult to do well, especially for rare political events like the onset of mass atrocities. In order to address this challenge, the Early Warning Project has developed a system that combines statistical forecasting with crowd-sourced forecasts. This combination serves as the focus for this post.
We recently added the following question to our opinion pool: Before January 1, 2015, will the leader of another major militia group in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo surrender?* This might seem like an odd topic for a system designed to assess risks of future mass atrocities. As this question implies, however, we also plan to use the system from time to time to assess prospects for the cessation or reduction of atrocities in cases where they are already happening. Our open question on the possibility of a peace deal this year in Colombia is another example.
The evolution of Kenyan politics since its last episode of mass killing, after the country's December 2007 elections, hardly appears promising. In 2013, during a presidential election widely considered freer and fairer than its predecessor, the Kenyan electorate returned to power two of the alleged instigators of the 2007–2008 violence. In 2012, a newly assertive military began operations against al-Shabaab in southern Somalia. In the two years since, the insurgency and its Kenyan affiliates have used the military's operations to justify reprisal attacks in several major Kenyan cities.