Projects

An abundance of large data sets and improved estimation methods have enabled
conflict researchers to estimate the risk of war or terrorist incidents quite precisely. However, as in the case of the prediction of particularly violent earthquakes, forecasting extremely bloody events in continuing conflicts has been difficult until now. This article reports how power laws can be used to predict extreme massacres ex post and ex ante. The power-law distribution that we use is based on the observation that standard probability distributions like the normal distribution typically underestimate the risk of such escalations. Using fatality data until the end of February 2013, we calculate the probability of at least one single event with 250 or more dead civilians at 80% (59%–94%) and between March and May 2013 of up to 48%. We discuss the ethical and practical implications of these findings and argue that the forecasts could provide a transparent risk assessment tool to decision makers.

The security externalities of globalization and capitalism continue to play an influential role in peace research. Typical contributions to these interrelated areas of scientific inquiry address the hope that the external openness (commercial liberalism) and the internal freedom of an economy (capitalist peace) pacify interstate as well as intrastate relations. I claim, despite the empirical support both theses have received, that they face considerable analytical hurdles. Commercial liberalism has, on a theoretical level, not yet moved much beyond the opportunity cost arguments that enlightenment philosophers first advanced more than 200 years ago. The capitalist peace research program similarly does not offer clear micro-level mechanisms explaining why the interactions between economic agents and political decisionmakers should be more peaceful in capitalist than in state-dominated economies. Drawing on the political economy literature, I argue that economic liberalism should distinguish between level- and change-effects of both globalization and capitalism and that thinking in analogies between domestic and interstate peace has prevented the field from making analytical headway. Both literatures will only profit from the advent of ‘big data’ in the case that the field addresses the theoretical challenges upfront.