Finding Harbingers of Violent Conflict: Using Pattern Recognition to Anticipate Conflicts

Abstract

This paper describes a particular use of pattern recognition techniques to identify pre-conflict situations. The goal is to find particular circumstances (which appear as patterns) in the descriptions of individual countries' situations before the outbreak of violent conflicts. If we find such patterns, we can then scan for them in current news reports. If we find a pattern in the current description of a country, we can then say “When we have seen this pattern before, 'x' percent of the time a conflict has erupted within 12 months.” To accomplish this, the paper describes methods for getting alerts that a conflict is about to erupt, the information needed to get those alerts, how to organize that information, and a procedure for searching for patterns in that information.