Is forecasting political violence feasible? Experiences from the ViEWS project

The ViEWS project has developed, tested, and iteratively improved a pilot Violence Early-Warning System since January 2017, providing early warnings for the three forms of political violence recorded by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program. ViEWS is rigorous, data-based, open-source, and publicly available to researchers and the international community. The talk will present the most recent version of the ViEWS pilot, explaining the methodology, and detail the recent forecasts. It will also present a formal, retrospective evaluation of the forecasts that ViEWS and related projects have published over the past few years.

Håvard Hegre (Phd in Political Science, University of Oslo 2004) is Dag Hammarskjöld Professor in Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University and adjunct Research Professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). His research has been published in the most important journals within political science, and received funding from the Research Council of Norway, the World Bank, the UN ESCWA, MISTRA, and the European Research Council (ERC). He is currently developing ViEWS, a pilot early-warning system for political violence funded by an ERC Advanced Grant (http://views.pcr.uu.se). He is on the editorial board or associate editor of Journal of Peace Research, International Studies Review, Research and Politics (R&P).

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The presentation is a part of the CCW Tuesday Seminar Series hosted by the Conflict Platform.