Announcements and Recent Analysis

Renewed Armed Conflict in Southern Turkey

Last month, prominent Turkish human rights lawyer Tahir Elci was shot dead on a street in Diyarbakir, southern Turkey. Elci had been an outspoken activist for Kurdish rights in a region that has seen decades of conflict between Turkish security forces and the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), a militant and political movement for greater Kurdish autonomy. In TIME magazine, Jared Malsin writes that Elci’s murder is a sign of dark and uncertain days ahead for Turkey as it follows the collapse of a ceasefire between the PKK and the Turkish government in July.

When It Comes to Forecasting, Put a Number On It

Mass atrocities occur rarely, and they are hard to predict. So aren’t risk assessments in the form of predicted probabilities, like the ones the Early Warning Project produces, a little too precise? When we ask the participants in our opinion pool to assign a number to their beliefs about the likelihood that various events will happen, are we really adding useful information, or are we putting too fine a point on things?

Remembering the Nuremberg Laws: The True Meaning of Citizenship

For most of us, citizenship is a status we can comfortably take for granted. Yet the millions of people who are denied citizenship of the country where they reside often have no rights, no protections, and no recourse for the redress of grievances. The simplest of life’s activities—opening a bank account, getting a driver’s license, or even attending elementary school—becomes a risky and humiliating process fraught with unpredictable dangers and the threat of harassment, arrest, and often deportation.

Update: Myanmar Elections and Continued Risk of Mass Killing

The Rohingya, a Muslim minority group, will not be able to participate in this election because the government has deprived Rohingya men and women of the right to vote. Rohingya people in Myanmar have endured periods of violence and persecution since 1948; this most recent round of persecution follows a wave of violence unleashed in 2012 which forced an estimated 140,000 Rohingya to flee from their homes.

What Constitutes a Mass Killing?

As purveyors of early warning, we have to choose a definition in order to conduct and describe our risk assessments. If we aren’t very specific about what we’re attempting to foresee, we can’t build sound statistical models, and we can’t properly direct the attention of the experts in our opinion pool or assess the accuracy of their forecasts.

Discrimination and Instability Create New Mass Killing Risks in Pakistan

In examining the risk of state-led mass killing in Pakistan, the line between state and non-state actors is fuzzy, especially when it comes to perpetrators of mass violence against civilians. Rather than perpetrating violence themselves, Pakistani security forces—especially the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the Pakistani intelligence services—use militant groups to advance political and territorial objectives inside Pakistan and in contested areas like the Indian-administered Kashmir region. Ongoing violent conflict, especially in Pakistan’s northwest Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), also contributes to increased risks of new mass killing.

Increasing Violence in Central African Republic Points to Underlying Structural Risks

On Monday, the United Nations issued a statement calling for the immediate end to an escalation of violence in the Central African Republic. Dozens were killed after the murder of a man in Bangui, with many fearing that this could mark a return to the sectarian violence that saw thousands killed since violence began in December 2013. 

Opinion Pool Update: September 2015

The chart below summarizes our Expert Opinion Pool’s current take on risks of new mass-killing episodes in countries about which we’ve asked them.

How the Early Warning Project Assesses Syria

An Eyewitness Account: The Refugee Crisis

In the 1930s, the world watched as Nazi Germany forced its beleaguered Jewish population to leave their homes. The plight of Germany’s Jews engendered sympathy, but few countries opened their doors wider to admit more of the desperate refugees. While different in many respects, today the world—and Europe in particular—is facing the largest refugee crisis since World War II.