Armed conflicts can be prevented or reduced using Early Warning tools to analyze, track, and forecast fragility and conflict

In 2017, Deadly crisis zones have rightly been in the news: The crisis in Yemen, in which Saudi Arabia used equipment provided by the US and UK to bomb noncombatants and blockade supplies, has seen the civilian death toll climb above 5,000; civil conflict still rages in Afghanistan and Nigeria; Myanmar’s ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya has created a massive new refugee crisis, according to Vox.com.

But on the positive side of the ledger, ISIS has been militarily defeated in Syria and Iraq. The Syrian war, by far the most deadly conflict of this decade, has seen a lower death rate than previous years — estimated at 33,000 last year, compared with 50,000 in 2016. That suggests a continuation of the post-Cold War trend toward dramatically lower war deaths globally. Average battle deaths per 100,000 people worldwide were 5.7 a year between 1946 and 1989, compared with one per 100,000 each year between 1990 and 2010. We’re also continuing to see the almost-complete extinction of inter-state war.

An Early Warning and Response System (EWRS) is a tool whose primary objective is to prevent the escalation of violence that could jeopardize the integrity of individuals and democratic governance. The EWRS are mechanisms for preventing and addressing conflicts that focus on the systematic collection, processing and analysis of information (quantitative or qualitative) about conflict situations for the purpose of warning decision-makers so that they can take measures or implement actions that will avoid the emergence or escalation of conflict. These systems aim to: Identify the causes of a conflict, anticipate their outbreak, and mitigate their impact.

An initial version of the analytical tool called ViEWS (a political Violence Early-Warning System) was unveiled in June 2018. “ViEWS is a system that forecasts where in the world armed conflicts are going to occur. In a first stage we are focusing on Africa. Analyses cover the next 36 months and will be presented in the form of maps on which areas of conflict are marked with colours. Red signals high risk for conflict, while purple indicates low risk.”