ViEWS: A political Violence Early-Warning System

This article presents ViEWS ()a political Violence Early-Warning System) that seeks to be maximally transparent, publicly available, and have uniform coverage. ViEWS produces monthly forecasts atthe country and sub-national level for 36 months into the future and all three UCDP types of organized violence: state-based conflict, non-state conflict, and one-sided violence in Africa. The article presents the methodology and data behind these forecasts, evaluates their predictive performance, provides selected forecasts for October 2018 through October 2021, and indicates future extensions. ViEWS breaks the forecasting problem into a range of constituent thematic parts and modelling approaches, employing ensemble model averaging to optimize its predictions of the risk of organized violence. Current forecasts indicate a persistence of conflict in regions in Africa with a recent history of political violence but also alert to new conflicts such as in Southern Cameroon and Northern Mozambique. The evaluation additionally shows that ViEWS is able to accurately capture the longterm behavior of established political violence, as well as di usion processes such as the spread of violence in Cameroon. The performance demonstrated here indicates that ViEWS can be a useful complement to non-public conflict-warning systems.