World Disaster Report 2009: Early Warning/Action

I just finished reading the International Federation of the Red Cross’s (IFRC) new World Disaster Report 2009 which focused specifically on early warning and early action. I highly recommend it to those of us working on conflict early warning and rapid response.

Since the report is over 200 pages long, below are what I consider to be the most important excerpts (along with some of my own commentary).

People-Centered Approach

The report notes that “the development of a more people-centered approach is clearly essential to ensure that the warnings captured by satellites, computer modeling and other technologies reach at-risk communities and are then acted upon.”

The people-centered approach to early warning focuses on how individuals and communities can understand the threats to their own survival and well-being, share that awareness with others and take actions to avoid or reduce disaster. The risk of disaster is partly caused by external hazards (such as an earthquake, cyclone, surprise disease epidemic, war or economic crisis) that are difficult or impossible to stop. However, communities know that disasters are also about people being vulnerable, not being in the right place at the right time with adequate forms of protection.

I find the reference to war as an external hazard fascinating (and vindicating). I’ve been emphasizing the need for a people-centered approach to conflict early warning since 2003 based on my research in disaster management. But when I did so, I would often get push-back from “experts” who would be highly critical of my drawing on lessons learned from operational responses to “natural” disasters.

And yet, as I would typically reply, the international community almost always fails to correctly predict and/or prevent armed conflict. Hence my insisting that we should treat conflict as a hazard and focus more on preparedness—at least as a plan B if we fail to predict/prevent.

People-centred early warning suggests that rather than being vulnerable, people can be capable, resilient and able to protect themselves. Three basic requirements are that individuals and institutions have the knowledge about what is a threat, that people are able to communicate a change in threat, and that they are in a position to respond. People-centered approaches to early warning, therefore, require the right support from scientific and political institutions to provide the context within which they can become strong.

A key point on which many scholars and practitioners of disaster reduction agree is that ’strategies must extend beyond information provision to engage community members in ways that facilitate their adoption of protective actions.’

There’s no reason why we can’t take a similar approach to conflict early warning and response. In fact, many local communities in conflict have, and continue to do so. The question is, why aren’t we building on this existing capacity to render communities more resilient to conflict?

The elements of early warning systems most likely to fail are the the dissemination and communications of warning, and response capability and preparedness to act. A people-centered approach is especially essential for these two elements, one that focuses not only on the science and technology behind the warnings, but also on the social and psychological aspects of early warning and early action and on activities to build a culture of prevention, rather than a culture of short-term response.

Local-level involvement must start with the first element –building risk knowledge. Hazard assessment and risk mapping can help bridge the gap between scientific and local knowledge.

Communities suffering from food insecurity or disease outbreaks normally know about the impending disaster before the authorities. Early warning systems for slow onset disasters must be locally based and controlled, or at least there must be close coordination between national and local systems, to ensure early detection and early response.

The people-centered approach reinforces the important truth that it is people, not institutions, who should have rights. Institutions should be established in the interests of people. Early warning systems are, therefore, systems or institutions that must serve people’s needs.

Challenges of Technology

The three global early warning conferences (1998, 2003 and 2006) have fostered a new consensus: “early warning is a system, not a technology.”

Early warning is not only the production of technically accurate warnings but also a system that requires an understanding of risk and a link between producers and consumers of warning information, with the ultimate goal of triggering action to prevent or mitigate a disaster.

To be sure, “excessive focus on technological solutions without balancing the other components is not only expensive but it can create a false sense of security.”

Given the rise in information and communication technologies (ICT) and the difficulty in ensuring that only one, authoritative voice issues warnings, the risk of false alarms is increasing. Ideally, warnings would be transmitted by a single authoritative voice, but realistically, this does not always happen and cannot be controlled.

In my opinion, this will be increasingly difficult to control.

Many technical monitoring systems, whether global or national, continue to have a top-down, scientific bias. Warnings based on remotely sensed data or national modeling can miss important dynamics existing at the local level. A major challenge for all technical warning systems is how to build community-level early warning indicators and indigenous knowledge into the system. Early warning systems for slow-onset disasters such as droughts will not be accurate if they ignore community-level indicators. Even for rapid-onset disasters, local indicators can be important elements of the system if properly understood and integrated.

Even with well-coordinated structures, dissemination to remote areas is still difficult in many places and requires a combination of technological and non-technological solutions. There is no ‘one size fits all’ solution.

Studies have been carried out in Sri Lanka to evaluate the effectiveness of various ICT approaches, including satellite radio and SMS sent via cell phones. Even proponents of SMS-based dissemination view it as complementary to other warning channels due to limited cell phone penetration among the most vulnerable, language limitations with SMS, potential damage to cell phone networks during disasters, network congestion and suchlike. The traditional broadcast media remains the most widely used channel globally to disseminate warnings, but the effectiveness of this channel can be compromised if the most vulner able populations lack access to TVs or radios.

Planning and Preparedness

People are more likely to pay attention to warnings if they have been educated about the risks in advance and know what actions to take.

Contingency plans can map out roles and responsibilities in advance and speed the response time, although in many cases, they become routine annual documents rather than living, operational processes. Simulation exercises can be very effective in building response capabilities and bringing preparedness planning to life. They can test the response systems, coordination structures and the knowledge of at-risk populations.

A separation between the producers or operators of the early warning system and those making funding decisions for preparedness and response activities is common. When funding decisions fall in a different ministry or organization, those controlling the resources may require additional verification or analysis before taking action. Some of the most effective early response systems occur when information and analysis units are directly tied into funding units.

Response-oriented contingency planning has been advocated to increase the effectiveness of such time-critical livelihood interventions. Contingency planning should focus on the most probable scenarios and a limited number of feasible, tested response options. In these situations the goal is to reduce the associated timelines for implementation.

Early Action

In slow-onset disasters such as drought, it is difficult to define when an ‘emergency’ begins. Early warning systems monitor a variety of indicators, but without clear indicators to trigger response, it is often delayed until the effects are visible and populations have suffered economic or physical losses.

In order to achieve the last mile, early warning systems need to engage all people at community level, to be locally owned and shown to be cost-effective. Incidentally, systems that are inclusive lead to improved well-being and development of communities at many levels. Lay people with an interest in early warnings need not wait for experts to provide information.

Setting minimum standards in early warning might be a reasonable target for the people-centered approach and those responsible for assisting the well-being of communities. Responsibilities, on the other hand, lie in part with individuals, so that taking effective early action relates also to personal decision-making, the quality of community cohesion, values and ethics.

In the face of rising risks and rising uncertainties, effective early action is more important than ever, [which] works best when it spans a range of timescales, not just providing a more rapid response to a disaster, but also anticipating it days, hours, months, years and even decades in advance, and over time reducing the risk of a range of hazards.

That bridging of timescales is the key to early warning and early action: ‘routinely taking action before a disaster or health emergency happens, making full use of scientific information on all timescales.’ Practical early action, based on early warnings at all timescales, does pay off, reducing risks and saving lives.

I find this reference to timescales particularly fascinating as I’ve made similar arguments with more of an emphasis on bridging timescales with spatial scales for conflict early response. See my post on Scale and Complex Systems here.

Accurate risk maps, showing people and assets at risk, can be a key tool to inform plans and activities. In practice, many [...] early warning products are almost impossible to understand by non-experts. They are often overly technical, sometimes including large uncertainties. As a result, the raw products do not naturally lead humanitarian actors to a decision.

The one, rather major, criticism that I do have of the report is the repeated a-political references to Cyclone Nargis in Burma. At no point does the report acknowledge the political causes of the “natural” disaster and the political constraints placed on the disaster response community by Burma’s junta.

Global Impact Vulnerability Alert (GIVA): A New Early Warning Initiative?

Cross-posted on iRevolution.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon is calling for better real-time data on the impact of the financial crisis on the poor. To this end, he is committing the UN to the development of a Global Impact and Vulnerability Alert System (or GIVA) in the coming months.  While I commend the initiative’s focus on innovative data collection, I’m concerned that this is yet another “early warning system” that will fail to bridge alert and operational response.

The platform is being developed in collaboration with the World Bank and will use real time data to assess the vulnerability of particular countries or populations. “This will provide the evidence needed to determine specific and appropriate responses,” according to UNDP. UN-Habitat opines that the GIVA will be a “vital tool to know what is happening and to hold ourselves accountable to those who most need our help.”

According to sources, the objective for the GIVAis to “ensure that in times of global crisis, the fate of the poorest and most vulnerable populations is not marginalized in the international community’s response. By closely monitoring emerging and dramatically worsening vulnerabilities on the ground, the Alert would fill the information gap that currently exists between the point when a global crisis hits vulnerable populations and when information reaches decision makers through official statistical channels.”

GIVA will draw on both high frequency and low frequency indicators:

“The lower frequency contextual indicators would allow the Alert system to add layers of analysis to the real time “evidence” generated by the high frequency indicators. Contextual indicators would provide information, for example, on a country’s capacity to respond to a crisis (resilience) or its exposure to a crisis (transmission channels). Contextual indicators could be relatively easily drawn from existing data bases. Given their lesser crisis sensitivity, they are generally collected less frequently without losing significantly in relevance.”

“The high frequency indicators would allow the system to pick up significant and immediately felt changes in vulnerability at sentinel sites in specific countries. This data would constitute the heart of the Alert system, and would provide the real-time evidence – both qualitative and quantitative – of the effects of external shocks on the most vulnerable populations. Data would be collected by participating partners and would be uploaded into the Alert’s technical platform.”

“The pulse indicators would have to be highly crisis sensitive (i.e. provide early signals that there is a significant impact), should be available in high periodicity and should be able to be collected with relative ease and at a reasonable cost. Data would be collected using a variety of methodologies, including mobile communication tools (i.e. text messaging), quick impact assessment surveys, satellite imagery and sophisticated media tracking systems.”

The GIVA is also expected to use natural language processing (NLP) to extract data from the web. In addition, GIVA will also emphasize the importance of data presentation and possibly draw on Gapminder’s Trendalyzer software.

There’s a lot more to say on GIVA and I will definitely blog more about this new initiative as more information becomes public. My main question at this point is simple: How will GIVA seek to bridge the alert-response gap? Oh, and a related question: has the GIVA team reviewed past successes and failures of early warning/response systems?

The Mathematics of War: Before the TED Talk

My new colleague Sean Gourely recently presented his research on “The Mathematics of War” at the TED 2009 conference. I met Sean in March this year, a month after TED, and soon realized we had been doing very similar research on the mathematics of war. Indeed, I carried out related research with Dr. Ryan Woodard while at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) exactly three years ago, in June 2006.

However, the discovery that conflict follows a power law distribution was actually made by another physicist, Lewis Fry Richardson, some 60 years ago. A power law distribution relates the frequency and “magnitude” of events. For example, the Richter scale, relates the size of earthquakes to their frequency. Richardson found that the frequency of international wars and the number of casualities each produced followed a power law.

Before TED

More recently, my colleague Erik-Lars Cederman sought to explain Richardson’s findings in his 2003 peer-reviewed publication “Modeling the Size of Wars: From Billiard Balls to Sandpiles.” However, Lars used an invalid statistical technique to test for power law distributions.

In 2005, I began collaborating with Professors Neil Johnson and Michael Spagat on related research after I came across their fascinating co-authored study that tested casualty distributions in new wars (internal conflicts) for power laws. Turns out Sean also collaborated with Neil and Michael on the research he presented at TED, but he was not a co-author on the 2005 study, which explains why we only met 4 years later.

In any case, I invited Michael to present his research at The Fletcher School in the Fall of 2005 to generate interest here. Shortly after, I suggested to Michael that we test whether conflict events, in addition to casualties, followed a power law distribution. I had access to an otherwise proprietary dataset on conflict events that spanned a longer time period than the casualty datasets that he and Neils were working off. I also suggested we try to test whether casualties from natural disasters follow a power law distribution.

We chose to pursue the latter first and I submitted an abstract to the 2006 American Political Science Association (APSA) conference to present our findings. Soon after, I was accepted to the Santa Fe Institute’s Complex Systems Summer Institute for PhD students and took the opportunity to pursue my original research in testing conflict events for power law distributions with my colleague Dr. Woodard.

Disaster Casualties

The APSA paper, presented in August 2006, was entitled “Natural Disasters, Casualties and Power Laws:  A Comparative Analysis with Armed Conflict” (PDF). Here is the paper’s abstract and findings:

Power-law relationships, relating events with magnitudes to their frequency, are common in natural disasters and violent conflict. Compared to many statistical distributions, power laws drop off more gradually, i.e. they have “fat tails”. Existing studies on natural disaster power laws are mostly confined to physical measurements, e.g., the Richter scale, and seldom cover casualty distributions. Drawing on the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) International Disaster Database, 1980 to 2005, we find strong evidence for power laws in casualty distributions for all disasters combined, both globally and by continent except for North America and non-EU Europe. This finding is timely and gives useful guidance for disaster preparedness and response since natural catastrophes are increasing in frequency and affecting larger numbers of people.  We also find that the slopes of the disaster casualty power laws are much smaller than those for modern wars and terrorism, raising an open question of how to explain the differences. We show that many standard risk quantification methods fail in the case of natural disasters.

Conflict Casualties

Dr. Woodard and I presented our research on power laws and conflict events at SFI in June 2006. We produced a paper in August of that year entitled “Concerning Critical Correlations in Conflict, Cooperation and Casualties” (PDF). As the title implies, we also tested whether cooperative events followed a power law. As far as I know, we were the first to test conflict events not to mention cooperative events for power laws. In addition, we looked at conflict/cooperation (C/C) events in Western countries.

The abstract and some findings are included below:

Knowing that the number of casualties of war are distributed as a power law and given a rich data set of conflict and cooperation (C/C) events, we ask: Are there correlations among C/C events? Is there a correlation between C/C events and war casualties? Can C/C data be used as proxy for (potentially) less reliable casualty data? Can C/C data be used in conflict early warning systems? To begin to answer these questions we analyze the distribution of C/C event data for the period 1990–2004 in Afghanistan, Colombia, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Switzerland, UK and USA. We find that the distributions of individual C/C event types scale as power laws, but only over approximately a single decade, leaving open the possibility of a more appropriate fit (for which we have not yet tested). However, the average exponent of the power law (2.5) is the same as that found in recent studies of casualties of war. We find low levels of correlations between C/C events in Iraq and Afghanistan but not in the other countries studied. We find that the distribution of the sum of all conflict or cooperation events scales exponentially. Finally, we find low levels of correlations between a two year time series of casualties in Afghanistan and the corresponding conflict events.

Next Steps

Sean and I are hoping to collaborate in future research as there is still a lot of interesting work to be done in this area. In the meantime, however, we’re collaborating on Ushahidi’s Swift River, for which I recently developed a very basic pseudo code to score the veracity of incident reports.

Meeting Sean has reminded me just how interested and involved I was in the above research 3-4 years ago. While I haven’t pursued the power law research since, I did continue working with Dr. Woodard and produced another study last year on the application of geophsyics analysis to conflict data to identify for shocks and aftershocks in major conflicts. This will be the subject of my next blog post.

How Ushahidi Can Become a Real Early Response Platform

As is well known in the field of disaster management, preparedness and contingency planning is core to the success of people-centered early warning networks. See my previous post on “Insights from Disaster Early Warning.” While Ushahidi users can now subscribe to alerts by SMS, there are currently no response protocols linked to these individual alerts. The latter is not necessarily Ushahidi’s responsibility, but the team can play an important role by integrating a form for response protocols within the Ushahidi platform.

Ushahidi is closing the feedback loop between crowdsourcing and crowdfeeding by introducing an alert subscription feature. However, the notion of crowdsourcing response requires further develop- ment so that operational protocols can be implemented.

In other words, although users can subscribe to alerts, this does not mean they will be prepared to react or know what the best response is when they receive said alerts.

I witnessed this first-hand when setting up a community-based conflict early warning and response network in Timor-Leste. To be sure, the notion of “preparing for conflict” is not one that always comes naturally.

Imagine if the disaster early warning community only focused on forecasting and payed no attention to preparedness and contingency planning (PCP). Millions more would die every year without training, shelters and regular drills. PCP can also be applied to conflict early warning and rapid response.

An organization implementing Ushahidi would simply need to do the following: for every indicator category the organization identifies, a response protocol for that alert would be added to an Ushahidi “Reponse Protocol Form.”

So for Indicator “A”, a series of response protocols for that indicator would be listed in the Response Form. These protocols could be customized based on where and when the incident took place. The protocols could include information on nearby shelters, hospitals, police stations, food stocks, etc.

This is primarily logistical but PCP can also be applied to identify and formulate tactics for conflict management.

In Timor-Leste, I ran a short and informal PCP excercise by asking members of a local community to think through what they would do if a land dispute occured in their village. For example, who would they call or notify when they hear about the incident. How would they try and intervene to prevent the situation from getting worse? These questions generated a rich set of action-oriented protocols that drew on their own traditional conflict resolution mechanisms.

Ushahidi can plan an integral role in encouraging organizations and communities to think preventively by adding a simple technical functionality to the platform. “Response Protocol Forms” could be used to follow up SMS alerts with SMS Response Protocols. Clearly, the organization deploying Ushahidi would be responsible for ensuring the protocols are correct and up-to-date.

How Ushahidi Can Become a Real Early Warning Platform

Ushahidi currently uses incident reporting (or more technically event-logging) as the methodology to document violent events that have taken place. While Ushahidi’s use of FrontlineSMS accelerates the crowdsourcing of crisis information, the violence reported on Ushahidi has by definition already occurred and thus cannot be prevented.

This blog post is the first of a two-part series on taking Ushahidi to the next level. The second part in this series  addresses “How Ushahidi Can Become a Real Early Response Platform.”

Current Setup

Ushahidi’s use of SMS to crowdsource crisis information means that violent incidents can be reported in quasi real-time, a significant advantage over traditional conflict early warning systems such as the Horn of Africa’s Conflict Early Warning and Response Network (CEWARN) and the now defunct FAST Early Warning System by Swisspeace.

To be sure, the use of SMS and geo-tagging means that escalating violence can be documented as it happens and where it happens. This can alert organizations of the need to contain or prevent further bloodshed. However, as has been argued by scholars and practitioners, as more blood is spilled the probability of reversing the violence without military intervention grows slim.

Situation Reports

The more robust applied social science methodologies I have come across for field-based conflict early warning combine both incident and situation reporting. Think of them as two types surveys. While the list of indicators in incident reports (IncRep) comprises violent events that seek to be prevented, the list of indicators in situation reports (SitReps) comprises events that are thought to render IncRep indicators more likely.

In other words, if event E is listed on an IncRep, the corresponding SitRep would include events E – t, i.e., those events that usually precede the violent event E in time. These SitRep events can be political, social, economic, ecological, historical etc., and should be grouped into such categories.

However, events E – t that tend to mitigate or prevent events E should also be included in SitReps. We want to know what is going right in order to identify existing entry points for conflict management. Violent conflict is never total in the Clausewitzian sense of total war. There are always pockets of cooperation and intervention. These, however indirect, need to be identified and understood.

SitReps are completed periodically, e.g., on a weekly basis, unlike IncReps, which are completed episodically, i.e., as incidents of violence take place. In other words, regular and consistent situation reporting should be encouraged. SitRep events should be formulated as indicators framed as questions.

For example, “Are university students having their freedom of speech curtailed?” would imply that a regime has acted (an event) to restrict student behavior. This act could elicit student protests and thence “a violent crackdown by government forces,” which would be an IncRep indicator.

SitRep surveys should also use a Likert scale, i.e., answers to SitRep indicator questions should range from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.” This means the answers can be weighted. See the CEWARN screenshot above for an operational example of a situation report.

Rationale

Instead of only monitoring incident reports, i.e., violence that has already come to pass, Ushahidi users would be able to monitor and analyze the causal factors themselves to determine whether they are increasing in number and intensity. This could signal potential early warning signs before the causal factors translate into violent events.

As more IncReps and SitReps are completed, users can also empirically assess which SitRep indicators act as the real triggers (and “preventers”) of the violent events documented in IncReps. In addition, after weekly SitReps are completed over several months, they can be aggregated to form a baseline for what the “average” week looks like.

Baseline Analysis

This means that users could then compare each new situation report with the baseline as depicted above. Inflection points, the doted circles, are points of interest since they denote change in trends. The dotted lines represent the threshold beyond which an organization will intervene. Alerts 1 and 2 signal that the threshold has almost been reached.

The important point to note is that baseline analysis of SitRep indicators can identify when the causes of violent conflict are increasing in intensity and frequency. Furthermore, patterns might be identifiable in the causes of episodic conflict and these could inform structural prevention strategies as well as conflict sensitive programming.

Next Steps

It would be great for Ushahidi to at least provide users with the option of setting up their own Situation Report form. I would also recommend that Ushahidi automatically flag when thresholds are crossed. In addition, Ushahidi should integrate some basic statistical techniques so that SitRep indicators (causes and preventers of conflict) could be automatically flagged when they are statistically correlated with IncRep indicators, i.e., violent events.

The purpose of including SitReps in Ushahidi is to encourage evidence-based programming and make early warning less of a hypothetical possibility.

The Internet Means Rwanda Cannot Happen Again

Today’s UK Guardian quotes from an interview with Gordon Brown in which he reflects on the role of technology in post-election Iran.

According to Brown, the internet means that “foreign policy can never be the same again” and because of the way information is now distributed, “you cannot have Rwanda again … foreign policy can no longer be the province of just a few elites.” He descibed this as “more tumultuous than any previous economic or social revolution” and said that “this week’s events in Iran are a reminder of the way that people are using new technology to come together in new ways to make their views known.”

Some rather bold words. If we have learned anything in the field of conflict early warning it is that timely information is rarely the barrier to rapid and effective response. In other words, more information, even if shared globally, does not imply that response will follow. Furthermore, advocacy does not equate to operational response and conflict prevention.

Can a global panopticon really deter armed conflict?

There is plenty of public information on Darfur, ranging from the Google Earth Darfur project to Eyes on Darfur initiative. The latter provides regularly updated high-resolution satellite imagery of at-risk villages on a website for all the world to see should one or more of the villages be attacked. It is unclear whether this has in fact served as a deterrent. Please see my post on GIS Technology for Genocide Prevention.

US Assistant Secretary of State on Conflict Early Warning

Assistant Secretary of State Susan Rice delivered a speech today on the “Responsibility to Protect.” In her speech, Ms Rice emphasized the need to “sharpen and strengthen our instruments for conflict management, and hone them to cope specifically with mass atrocities.” She identified 5 key instruments:

1. Conflict Early Warning, Analysis and Decision-Making
2. Preventive Diplomacy
3. Peacekeeping
4. Sanctions
   
5. Peacebuilding

Here are her remarks in her own words:

“First are the linked questions of early warning, analysis, and decision-making. We must do more to ensure that a lack of information will never be a reason again for inaction. Working with governments, regional organizations, and NGO partners, we should strive to collect more, different, and better information about the risks and signs of mass violence – and then to share it. That data should also be analyzed with extra sensitivity to the potential for atrocity. And it should be channeled in real time to decision-makers who can do something about it.

But one significant caveat: history shows that slow policy responses to mass slaughter often stems from factors other than a genuine absence of information about what is unfolding. More often, policymakers knew a significant amount but were held back by competing policy priorities, limited knowledge of the country at risk, disincentives for speaking out, political concerns, and other factors.

Second, preventive diplomacy. The last twenty years and more have taught us that international mediation and diplomacy, backed by a readiness to use other tools, are among the most effective ways to prevent and halt violence. At the UN, innovations like mediation standby teams are an important start, but these teams remain underutilized and they need more resources. We still have too few mediators with the right skills ready to deploy in real time – and, I might add, far too few women. We need also greater surge capacity, closer cooperation among mediators, and better coordination between mediation and other tools of conflict management.  And we need to redouble our efforts to forge the international unity it will take for mediation to succeed.

Third, peacekeeping. We greatly appreciate the courage and dedication shown by UN blue helmets around the world, but these brave men and women are often stretched up to – or beyond- their limits. We must make sure that peacekeepers have the help they need to prevent a fragile peace from breaking down, and we must invest in more effective and efficient peacekeeping that can protect civilians menaced by rebel bands and marauding gangs, whether in Haiti or the eastern DRC.

But UN peacekeepers – even better trained and equipped ones – are not always the right solution when innocents are in peril. Sometimes, an unfolding atrocity is so large or so fast that it can be quelled only by the swift arrival of combat-ready brigades or their equivalent-operating outside the UN chain of command, and not built from scratch as a UN peacekeeping force must be. Only a handful of countries have this capacity at the ready, and even fewer can or will guarantee a response when called upon. Such governments, and regional organizations including NATO and the European Union, must take a hard look at their will and capacity to quickly deploy – either to fill the gap before peacekeepers arrive, reinforce them during a crisis, or to respond in cases where peacekeepers are not the right answer to begin with.

Through our Global Peace Operations Initiative, the United States has helped train and equip tens of thousands of peacekeepers, and we are working to improve peacekeepers’ abilities to protect civilians from the imminent threat of violence.

Fourth, we must put the bite back in sanctions. We have increasingly sophisticated tools to compel states and leaders to abide by international laws and norms. Through the UN, we can freeze individuals’ assets, ban international travel, restrict the flow of luxury goods and arms, and do much more to limit abusers’ abilities to threaten others. But, the Security Council often finds it difficult to overcome member states’ reluctance to wield and fully implement sanctions on behalf of the victims of mass atrocities. I hope to be able to work with my Security Council colleagues to make better, smarter use of sanctions -not only to maintain global order or to halt proliferation but also to save innocent lives at immediate risk. Sanctions can be an effective, if not always a flexible, targeted instrument, and we must seek to strengthen them.

And, finally, peacebuilding. We still have much more to do to foster firm foundations for peace in societies that are trying to leave years of conflict behind them. Just because the killing stops does not mean it won’t start again. The past decade has witnessed major innovations in peacebuilding, including the creation of the UN’s Peacebuilding Commission, but we have much farther to go.  We need more flexible development funds that arrive sooner; early investments in the core capacities of a struggling state; international support for national efforts to reinforce the rule of law, demobilize ex-combatants and reform state security services.  We need lasting support for victims of sexual violence and other human rights abuses; and an insistence that we not assume the job is done until the peace is secure.

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall…

Which conflict forecasting model is the most accurate of them all? None are accurate to begin with. Has no one read Nassim Taleb’s “The Black Swan“?

Recent empirical studies demonstrate that experts, i.e., us (and our sophisticated systems and methodologies) are only marginally better than novices in our ability to accurately forecast political and economic events. Furthermore, these studies show that neither group’s forecasts are much better than random guessing.

Of greater concern still is the empirical observation that experts nevertheless remain consistently overconfident of the accuracy of their own forecasts. This is compared to novices who tend to be more conservative vis-à-vis their forecasting abilities although they are equally (in)effective when it comes to accuracy. A separate study found that “somehow, the analysts’ self-evaluation did not decrease their error margin after their failures to forecast.”

Perhaps the most telling test of how academic methods fare in the real world was run by Spyros Makridakis, “who spent part of his career managing competitions between forecasters who practice a ‘scientific method’ called econometrics […]. Simply put, he made people forecast in real life and then he judged their accuracy” (1).

This led to the following lamentable conclusion “statistically sophisticated or complex methods do not provide more accurate forecasts than simpler ones” (2). And so, despite the fact that “billions of dollars have been invested in developing sophisticated data banks and early warnings, we have to note that even the most expensive systems have shown a striking inability to forecast political events,” not to mention galvanize any preventive measures (Rupesinghe 1988).

What I really don’t understand, however, is how some experts profess to forecast conflicts and at the same time use the word “discontinuous” to describe trends in conflict. If a process experiences tipping points (or punctuated equilibria) then no econometric model however fancy can provide accurate forecasts. Talk to anyone at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) if you’re not convinced. Or read this piece by Charles Doran on “Why Forecasts Fail.”

Video: Early Warning of Financial Crisis

Peter Schiff is the author of “Crash Proof: How to Profit From the Coming Economic Collapse,” published in 2007. He is well known for his “bearish views on the United States economy and for his prescient predictions of the economic crisis of 2008.”

The short video interview below is shocking and reminds me of Cassandra from Greek mythology who foreswaw the destruction of Troy but no one believed her. Note how the journalists from Fox News and other channels laugh at and ridicule Peter Schiff for his “outlandish” predictions.

Click on video below to play the interview.

Click to play Video

We observe the same dynamic in the field of conflict early warning. In Barney Rubin’s book: “Blood at the Doorstep: The Politics of Preventive Action,” published in 2002, he notes that at-risk communities may not believe rumors of impending armed violence; “to the Hitlerian technique of the Big Lie we must add that of the Horrendous Truth—a truth so awful that one can hardly credit it” (p 139). No pun on credit.

So my question is, if the early warning is there, in a published book, on news programs, etc., is warning or response the problem?

Toward a Complex Adaptive Early Warning/Response Community

This post was inspired by Calvin Andrus’s “Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community: The Wiki and the Blog,” which recently published on the CIA website.

Just like my post on “Swarming Response” was adapted from an article geared towards early response to terrorism attacks, shares many important insights that our conflict early warning community should take note of. In particular, Andrus strongly promotes the extensive use of wikis and blogs to improve adaptability to a rapidly changing environment.

Below are some telling excerpts worth reading.

• Information about a new development in Baghdad is known in Washington within minutes. Decisions about a response are made in Washington within minutes. These decisions are implemented in Baghdad within minutes. The total “intelligence-decision-implementation” cycle time can be as short as 15 minutes. While this is an extreme example, it highlights the tremendous compression of the response time required by all involved compared to previous generations.

• This compression is not just a preferred work style within the US national security community. It is characteristic of the way the world works in the 21st century. Thus, not only do we respond more quickly, but also the circumstances to which we respond—in and of themselves— develop more quickly. These rapidly changing circumstances take on lives of their own, which are difficult or impossible to anticipate or predict.

• The only way to meet the continuously unpredictable challenges ahead of us is to match them with continuously unpredictable changes of our own. We must transform the Intelligence Community into a community that dynamically reinvents itself by continuously learning and adapting as the national security environment changes.

• Intelligence officers must be enabled to act more on their own. Just as people in a market are empowered to make their own purchases, individual ants in a colony can decide which task to perform, and military units are able to choose battlefield tactics in real-time, so, too, intelligence officers must be allowed to react—in independent, self-organized ways—to developments in the national security environment.

• Intelligence officers must share much more information. Just as military units in the field must know where other units are located in geographic space, intelligence analysts must know where their colleagues across the Community are located in intellectual space. This knowledge results from sharing information. Information-sharing among individuals allows market niches to be filled, ants to fend off predator attacks, and plants to distribute themselves in the ecosystem. Increased information-sharing among intelligence officers will allow these officers to self-organize to respond in near-real-time to national security concerns.

• To allow sharing and feedback, we need a space that is open not just to the Intelligence Community but also to non-intelligence national security elements. We need a space with a large critical mass of intelligence officers. We need a space that is neither organizationally nor geographically nor temporally bound. We need a secure space that can host a corporate knowledge repository. We need a flexible space that supports tools for self-organizing (wiki), information sharing (blog), searching, and feedback. We need a place in which tradecraft procedures can be implemented. In short, we need a space that is always on, ubiquitously distributed, and secure.

• SIPRNet (Secret Internet Protocol Router Network) is managed by the Defense Information Systems Agency (www.disa.mil). It is widely accessible by intelligence officers and other national security officers alike. It has been deployed to every embassy and every military command. It is a more attractive experimental sharing-space than the Top Secret Community Network (JWICS), because more intelligence officers access it, policy community officials access it, the tradecraft (security) rules are simpler, and it reaches more organizations and geographic locations. Moreover, SIPRNet is designed to host Internet-based tools such as wikis and blogs.