Can wars be forecasted? A central difficulty is that warnings of a looming war tomorrow are likely to affect behavior today. Whether decision-makers attempt to prevent its onset or to hasten it, the initial forecast will no longer hold. Predictable conflicts will therefore tend not to occur, and...

Do conflict processes exhibit repeating patterns over time? And if so, can we exploit the recurring shapes of the time series to forecast the evolution of conflict? Here we study escalation patterns using recent machine-learning methods derived from information geometry, clustering, and pattern...

Does the recurrence of wars suggest that we are doomed to repeat the errors of the past, and fail to recognize dangerous situations for what they are? Unfortunately, little is known about how well wars are anticipated. Do conflicts tend to come as a surprise? We estimated the risk of war as...

The onset of interstate conflict often hinges on seemingly random events ('sparks') such as the assassination of Franz-Ferdinand in 1914. However, the literature on the causes of interstate war has mostly focused on identifying fertile grounds ('powder kegs'), ignoring these intricacies of...

Civil wars greatly vary in the number of refugees they generate, ranging from zero to over six millions in a given conflict. Work on this variation has largely focused on 'push' factors--deleterious attributes of the home country that lead to refugee flows, such as violence and repression. Yet,...

Does inequality hinder or promote cooperation? To answer this question, we study a Prisoner’s Dilemma with local adaptation, to which we add heterogeneity in payoffs. In our model, agents vary in their wealth, and this inequality affects their potential gains and losses. We find that, in such...

States often bargain over objects that affect their future bargaining power. A large territory, for example, is not only valuable in itself, but also as a source of raw material, population and defense. As a result, states not only try to maximize their benefits when they negotiate over the...

We discuss models and data of crowd disasters, crime, terrorism, war and disease spreading to show that conventional recipes, such as deterrence strategies, are often not effective and sufficient to contain them. Many common approaches do not provide a good picture of the actual system behavior,...

Research on international conflict has mostly focused on explaining events such as the onset or termination of wars, rather than on trying to predict them. Recently, however, forecasts of political phenomena have received growing attention. Predictions of violent events, in particular, have been...