GPANet-Report-2012

15 Birger Heldt
Mass Atrocities Early Warning Systems:
Data Gathering, Data Verification, and Other Challenges
magnitude of atrocities over time, and takes a closer look at the Kivu regions in
the Democratic Republic of Congo. Section 3 highlights two challenges that early
warning systems are exposed to - data gathering and data verification - whereas
section 4 presents possible early warning indicators found in recent research as
well as avenues and obstacles for the further accumulation of knowledge. Section 5
contains some final reflections and presents policy implications for national, regional
and international actors from a select few early warning indicators. It is an attempt to
highlight whether early warning indicators may offer implications for not only when
violence may occur, but also what to do, and not to do.
2. THE NATURE OF THE CHALLENGE: MAGNITUDE AND PREVALENCE OF
ATROCITIES
Not only has the annual number of armed conflicts and G/P decreased drastically
since the end of the Cold War, but also so has the annual number of direct war
casualties. 3 Figure I below covers 1948-2010 and shows a peak in the number of ongoing
conflicts and G/Ps in 1991, after which there has been a decrease of about 40%
in conflicts and around 90% in G/Ps. 4 While there were fewer conflicts before the
1970s than today, the number of states and thus also the potential number of states
exposed to civil and interstate wars, has doubled since second World War.
One insight from figure I is that the historical conflict pattern shows inertia:
short-term increases/decreases in absolute (not relative) numbers are limited.
Annual changes by some ten conflicts have historically taken at least four years to
materialize. If history is a guide to the future, then the number of armed conflicts
will continue to not show any major changes in the short-term. As for the medium-
to long-term development, a simulation covering 2010-2050 and based on the most
recent statistical models of civil wars, offers similar predictions: at worst, the global
number of conflicts will stay virtually unchanged, and at best there will be a small
global decline (Hegre et al. 2009). Regional variations are predicted, and involve more
conflicts in eastern, central and southern Africa, and fewer or unchanged numbers
in other regions. Everything else equal, and given that genocides and mass killings
3 By “armed conflict” is meant organized armed violence between two governments, or one government
and one non-governmental party, over the issues of government or territory, which has incurred at
least 25 casualties in a single year (Petterson & Themner 2011). Genocides and politicides refer to the
“promotion, execution, and/or implied consent of sustained policies by governing elites or their agents –
or, in the case of civil wars, either of the contending authorities – that are intended to destroy, in whole
or part, communal, political or politicized ethnic groups” (Harff 2003: 58).
4 Conflict data are from Petterson & Themner (2011), G/P data is from Harff (2007).