Lowy Lecture Series: Forecasting genocide and politicide for early warning and prevention - Benjamin Goldsmith

This talk presents findings from a project to develop a quantitative forecasting tool for serious political instability, mass atrocities, and genocide, including software which should be of use to policy-makers thinking ahead on a 1-5 year time horizon. The project, ‘Understanding and Forecasting Political Instability, Mass Atrocities, and Genocide: Combining Social Science and Machine Learning Approaches’ combines expertise from political science and computer science. Distinguishing features of the models are a two-stage approach: special emphasis on time-sensitive indicators (such as the occurrence of elections, natural disasters, assassinations, and changes in political institutions), and attention to shifts in global and local international conditions. Preliminary forecasting performance includes ‘out-of-sample’ forecasts for 1988-2003 which predict 88.9% of genocide onsets correctly while also predicting 75.1% of non-onset years correctly, a considerable improvement over any other published study. The models provide a reasonably reliable annual shortlist of at-risk countries for policy makers. The Project is supported by the Australian Responsibility to Protect Fund. Its findings will be presented by co-author Associate Professor Benjamin Goldsmith at the University of Sydney. You can download the paper at the following link: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2027396 Benjamin Goldsmith is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney and a co-author of the project. His research and teaching are in the areas of international relations, comparative foreign policy, and political psychology.