Since the start of the year, our early-warning system's opinion pool has included a question about the risk of a new episode of state-led mass killing* occurring in Iraq before 2015. As noted in a recent post, our forecasters have consistently seen that country as one of the cases at greatest risk worldwide, and their concern increased significantly in May as the civil war in predominantly Sunni parts of the country escalated.
A recent post on this blog by Alessandra Necamp aptly discusses our paper in the American Journal of Political Science, which shows that when appropriately composed in personnel type and number, UN peacekeeping missions reduce violence against civilians in civil wars. These findings can be held in light of a recent Amnesty International report on increasing violence against civilians in South Sudan.
Our statistical risk assessments continue to identify Ethiopia as one of the world’s countries at greatest risk of state-led mass killing, and recent reports of violent repression in Ethiopia’s Oromia region suggest one pathway by which that dismal but still unlikely outcome could happen.
Since May 28, we have been running a wiki survey asking “What are the best policy options for engaging with the government of Sudan to end or curtail its attacks on civilians across the country?” Recently overshadowed by the civil war in South Sudan, atrocities in Sudan have continued in regions such as Blue Nile, Kordofan and Nuba Mountains.
In a new post on African Arguments, Bert Ingelaere and Marijke Verpoorten ask rhetorically if state-led mass killing could happen again in Rwanda and answer with an unequivocal yes.
The ongoing mass atrocities in South Sudan have been particularly stunning because they have taken place in the presence United Nations peacekeeping forces. Shouldn’t U.N. peacekeepers have prevented these attacks on civilians? More broadly as we consider our annual statistical risk assessments for state-led mass killing, does the presence of U.N. peacekeeping operations reduce the risk of a mass killing episode?
On Sunday, May 25, 2014, Colombians went to the polls to elect their next president. Electoral rules are such that if no candidate receives 50% of the vote, a second round (a run-off) occurs between the two candidates that received the most votes in the first round. Given relatively strong showings by “non-traditional” or “third parties” in the election (more about this below) and historically high levels of protest ballots cast for no candidate (“voto en blanco”), no candidate cleared the 50% threshold. The two top vote-getters, incumbent President Juan Manuel Santos (who received 25.66% of the vote) and Óscar Iván Zuluaga (who received 29.26% of the vote) will face one another in a run-off on June 15, 2014.
The civil war in northern Mali is flaring anew, and with it, possibly, the risk of mass atrocities.
Since December 2013, the Central African Republic (CAR) has experienced a rapid escalation in armed violence, with nearly 650,000 internally displaced and over 300,000 seeking refuge outside of the country, and a looming humanitarian crisis. Reports call CAR a “hell on earth” with descriptions of wide-spread ethnic violence that is increasingly being described as ethnic cleansing. In the midst of what has occurred on the ground, the Early Warning Project is also examining the accuracy of forecasts derived both from our statistical risk assessment and also from our expert opinion pool. In our statistical risk assessment, CAR was ranked in the top 15 countries most at risk for a state-led mass killing episode, defined as “the deliberate actions of state security forces or other armed groups result in the deaths of at least 1,000 noncombatant civilians over a period of one year or less.”
Iraq’s long-running civil war has spread and intensified again over the past year, and the government’s fight against a swelling Sunni insurgency now threatens to devolve into the sort of indiscriminate reprisals that could produce a new episode of state-led mass killing there. The idea that Iraq could suffer a new wave of mass atrocities at the hands of state security forces or sectarian militias collaborating with them is not far fetched.
Find information on historical cases of genocide and other atrocities.