Conflict Forecast

Armed conflict - or the fear of it - is one of the central problems we face in our societies. At ConflictForecast, we want to contribute to peacebuilding by making the allocation of public resources and attention smarter and more efficient. Conflict leads not only to death and destruction but also to the displacement of millions of people from their homes and to migration flows that are difficult to calculate. It is a declared goal of organizations such as the United Nations, the World Bank, or the International Monetary Fund to better predict armed conflicts and, ideally, to prevent them. However, there is a problem: preventing conflicts is so complex and multi-layered that we do not know where to focus our attention. As a result, we focus almost exclusively on conflicts that are already underway or have recently ended. The international community is often very active in high-risk countries and usually focuses on economic development rather than conflict per se. And so we stumble from one crisis to the next. The current system is not working. Our goal is to change this approach in the long term. We specialize in conflict forecasting, prevention, and decision support. Our forecasting methodology is explicitly designed to detect new, subtle signals of conflict risk in countries not currently at war. Detecting these risks is extremely difficult and requires accepting false positives. We then integrate these predictions into a novel policy evaluation tool to assess the tradeoff between the benefits of preventive action and the costs of acting on false-positive signals. Our "Prevention Gains" section shows that the dire costs of conflict justify wasting resources in low-risk settings. Under "Updated Prevention Gains," we provide our best estimate of where resources would go furthest. Conflictforecast is hosted at the Fundacio d'Economia Analitica and the Barcelona School of Economics.