2015 Mass Atrocity Forecasts

In my last post, I looked back on how my predictions fared in 2014. While there are a couple different ways to measure success, all in all I was a little under 50%.

Here are my predictions for 2015. Like last time, I’ll not do a simple yes/no, but rather a percentage of how likely a mass atrocity is to happen. By mass atrocity, I mean 1,000 deaths caused intentionally by a discrete combatant group against another discrete noncombatant group. I’m including more countries than I did last year, and hopefully this will offer more accurate forecasts.

• Nigeria (95%)
• Iraq (95%)
• Syria (95%)
• Pakistan (75%)
• Afghanistan (70%)
• South Sudan (70%)
• Sudan (65%)
• Mexico (55%)
• CAR (50%)
• North Korea (50%)
• Somalia (30%)
• DRC (30%)
• Libya (25%)
• Gaza (25%)
• Cameroon (20%)
• Ukraine (10%)
• Rwanda (10%)
• Lebanon (10%)
• Burundi (5%)
• Yemen (5%)
• Chad (5%)
• Guinea (5%)
• Kenya (5%)
• Ethiopia (5%)
• Burma (5%)
• Eritrea (5%)
• Zimbabwe (5%)
• Mali (5%)

Explaining my forecast for each of the 28 countries here would be tedious and probably unnecessary, so I’ll skip it. However, I’ll select a few countries where my risk prediction doesn’t generally line up with the consensus in the atrocity prevention community.

In Nigeria, Boko Haram has probably already committed a mass killing in 2015, and across the border in Cameroon, Boko Haram is also active, though the chances of a mass atrocity are lower if not insignificant.

Pakistan and Afghanistan are not countries on the traditional atrocity prevention agenda, but that has more to do with uneasy relationship between anti-atrocity advocates and the U.S. military than the countries’ risk. Their respective Taliban’s both committed atrocities last year, and it seems likely that trend will continue.

In Mexico, it’s never a question of absolute casualty figures but how those casualties are categorized. Because there aren’t clear numbers on how many cartel members die as opposed to civilians, it’s hard to know whether more than 1,000 are killed by a specific drug cartel, even if thousands will almost certainly die in 2015.

In the DRC, like Mexico, more than 1,000 are highly likely to die. However, the splintered nature of armed groups in the country’s east means I think it’s more likely than not no single group will kill 1,000 civilians. The situation’s not dissimilar in Libya, where there is rampant violence, but it is committed by a myriad of militias.

Israel probably committed a mass killing in Gaza last year, and while confrontations between Hamas and Israel seem to operate on two or three year cycles, there’s still a decent chance Israel ‘mows the grass’ again this year.

While Rwanda is often praised as one of Africa’s most efficient governments, this sheen of good governance masks a political powder-keg. Whenever the elite coalition Kagame has built fractures, the struggle to fill the resulting power vacuum will likely result in mass violence. The same principle applies in Zimbabwe and Eritrea.

Finally, Burundi and Burma are two countries that have been high on the atrocity prevention agenda that I rated at only 5%. In Burundi, it seems the government has repressed the opposition enough that ruling elites are unlikely to be threatened during the 2015 election. There are some parallels here with Burma. While the treatment of the Rohingya minority is horrendous, it seems Burma’s elites have settled on forcing emigration rather than initiating a mass killing, which would be more politically risky.

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Looking Back on My 2014 Mass Atrocity Forecasts

A year ago, I took a stab at predicting which countries would experience mass atrocities in 2014 (defined as 1,000 noncombatant intentional deaths caused by discrete group). My predictions were fairly accurate, if not perfectly so. Here’s what I predicted. I’ve put “YES” next to places that did experience atrocities and “NO” next to the countries that didn’t. For the countries where it’s simply too hard to know, I’ve put a “?”. I don’t want to get too in-depth into how I determined whether atrocities occurred, but I have some explanations in the footnotes for countries that are hard to judge one way or the other.

• Syria (95%) – YES
• South Sudan (85%) – YES
• Iraq (85%) – YES
• CAR (75%) – YES [1]
• Sudan (60%) – YES
• Afghanistan (50%) – YES [2]
• North Korea (50%) – ? [3]
• Mexico (35%) – ? [4]
• Nigeria (30%) – YES
• Burma (20%) – NO
• DRC (20%) – NO [5]
• Egypt (10%) – NO
• Mali (5%) – NO
• Venezuela (5%) – NO

To judge how accurate I was, one measure is to see each case as containing 100 points. If an atrocity did happen, then I get the number of percentage points that I predicted (for example, I get 95 out of 100 for Syria) and if one did not happen, I get the result of subtracting the number of percentage points I predicted from 100 (for example, I get 80 out of 100 for Burma). Because my predictions were not just yes/no, this method helps account for the probabilistic aspect. Measuring this way, I did very well, receiving 920 out of a possible 1200, excluding Mexico and North Korea because of the inconclusive judgments. However, that score should really be 920 out of 1400, because civilian deaths in Gaza during the Israel-Hamas conflict constitute a mass atrocity. Similarly, the Pakistani Taliban committed a mass atrocity. A mass atrocity may have occurred in Somalia, but the numbers don’t seem high enough to definitively say for sure.

There are a few problems with this metric for success, though. First, my numbers success rate is considerably boosted by the very high probability (the “No Shit List”) and the very low probability cases. If I remove the cases where I predicted probabilities above 80% and below 20%, and add in Pakistan and Gaza, my score comes out to a much less impressive 375 out of 800, even though by the standards of forecasting international events, it’s not bad.

The results of my projections have both optimistic and pessimistic ramifications for the ability to forecast atrocities. On the one hand, being a little less than 50% accurate in medium-risk cases is much better than the standard 65%-80% false positive ratio that’s common even in the best performing models (though it’s easier to outperform statistical models in one year than five). Additionally, with the exceptions of Pakistan and Gaza, no episodes of atrocities occurred in countries with probabilities less than 30%. On the other hand, in every case that I listed a probability that an atrocity would happen and it did, the country had been experiencing large-scale violent conflict at the beginning of 2014. One of the two cases I missed was also the one not experiencing large-scale violent conflict then.

Therein lies the problems. It’s fairly easy to predict where atrocities will occur for countries already experiencing mass violence. While it is certainly useful to predict anywhere where atrocities will occur, the real prize of forecasting is to identify the cases where atrocities will occur that aren’t obvious to the casual observer. Because mass atrocities are such rare events, that’s frustratingly difficult.

In my next post, I’ll put up my mass atrocity forecasts for 2015.

Update (1/16/15): Earlier today I realized that in analyzing my predictions I had missed the chance to analyze whether I had been overly optimistic or pessimistic about mass atrocities in 2014. I’m particularly interested to see if I avoided the bias that generally has forecasts over-predict the likelihood of rare events, which atrocities are.

I’ll do this by adding up the percentage points I predicted in total (and divide my 100) and then compare that to the actual occurrence of atrocities. If we exclude the atrocities that happened that I didn’t predict, I predicted there would be 5.4 mass atrocities in 2014. Within my prediction sample, there were actually 6 mass atrocities. So I was pretty close. My accuracy here was helped because each country that had a mass atrocity in 2014 in my predicted list also had one in 2013.

However, if I include Gaza and Pakistan (as I probably should), I was less accurate, again predicting 5.4 atrocities when 8 actually occurred. For whatever reason, I bucked the trend and under-predicted the number of atrocities that would occur in 2014.

Clarification (1/4/15): For this post, I defined a mass atrocity as 1,000 deaths in a single year. While this is partially consistent with other definitions for a mass atrocity used by The Early Warning Project and my thesis, it doesn’t clarify the conditions for when a mass atrocity continues over multiple years. The convention is that 1,000 is required in the onset year, and then if the number of deaths drops below a much lower threshold for a few years, then the mass killing episode ends. For example, by the Early Warning Project’s definition, a state-led mass killing episode continued in Myanmar last year, even though as far as I can tell, the casualty numbers were well under 1,000. For my predictions, because I’m only looking at one year at a time, I’m thinking about whether death counts will reach 1,000 each year. Neither definition is better than the other, but for the purposes of my predictions, the 1,000 threshold every year makes more sense.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

[1] Though the numbers aren’t entirely clear, it seems very likely that more 1,000 noncombatants were killed by anti-balaka forces (and possibly ex-Seleka forces too) in 2014.

[2] By July, more than 1,500 civilians had already been killed, with 74% of those caused by anti-government forces (mostly the Taliban). The total number had risen to over 3,000 by November, with the Taliban responsible for 75%.

[3] Obviously, the North Korean regime isn’t releasing data on its prison camps, but investigations by Amnesty and the OHCHR makes it seem very likely more than 1,000 civilians died in 2014. However, the lack of data makes it impossible to know for sure.

[4] Like North Korea, there’s just not enough data to say. It’s not that we don’t know that huge numbers of people were killed by organized crime, but it’s unclear how many of those count as civilians (cartel members are combatants in this case). It seems likely, but one can’t be sure.

[5] While the civilian death toll almost certainly exceeded 1,000 in 2014, to my knowledge, no one single group can claim to have killed more than 1,000 noncombatants.

What Explains Israel’s Military Tactics in Gaza?

Since Israel’s dismantled its few settlements in the territory, Gaza’s residents have suffered from a blockade and repeated engagements between militants and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), costing thousands of lives. The conflict originated in mid-June, when three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped and killed by an unknown group of Palestinians. While Hamas’ Gazan leadership almost certainly had nothing to do with the kidnappings, the Israeli government used the boys’ disappearance to launch a crackdown on Hamas, first in the West Bank, and subsequently in Gaza. In turn, Hamas responded with an increased volley of rockets directed at Israel.

Israel’s approach to the conflict in Gaza makes little strategic sense. It cannot eliminate Hamas (without a lengthy and unlikely occupation), and doing so would likely only provide an opportunity for even more radical groups to come to power. The initial stated goal was to destroy Hamas tunnels, but Egypt managed to do just that without any kinetic military action. Attacking Gaza has increased the number of rockets heading toward Israel and resulted in the deaths of 31 Israelis.  As Israel expert Brent Sasley argues, Israel’s strategic objective of creating a “quiet” Gaza is vague and likely unattainable.

If Israel does indeed lack a strategy in dealing with Gaza, then what is guiding its tactics in the current conflict? 680 Gazans have been killed by the IDF since Operation Protective Edge began. According to the UN, 74% of those have been civilians (though this is statistic reflects the death toll from a few days ago). Human Rights Watch, while being conservative in its claims, notes there is evidence that Israel likely deliberately targeted civilians. Additionally, there is evidence Israel has used anti-personnel flechette shells. In all likelihood, Israel has repeatedly and intentionally shelled civilian targets.

Hundreds of civilian deaths in a few days is a horrendous record, but it should also be noted that Israel does have the capacity to kill more. Consequently, Israel has walked a fine line between portraying itself as a protector of Gazan civilians and publicizing fairly transparent attempts to deny the category all together. What explains Israel’s seemingly schizophrenic strategy of intentionally targeting civilians (knowing these incidents will end up in local and international news) while simultaneously trumpeting its humanitarian credentials? Why kill huge numbers of civilians while also targeting Hamas? Why not just one or the other?

 

Factors that lead Israel to target civilians

Domestic politics: Going after Hamas has long been popular in Israel, and this current flare-up is no different. The drawn-out saga of the kidnapped teenagers was manufactured to gain public support for the Netanyahu administration, and the subsequent blaming and targeting of Hamas seems to represent a continuation of the strategy. Creating a high body count, be the victims militants or civilians, in a war against Hamas garners public approval, especially among the Israeli right.

Revenge: Some within Israeli’s government and military may genuinely believe Hamas was responsible for the kidnapped teenagers’ deaths or that they deserve to be punished for launching rockets at Israel. This desire for revenge may cloud their differentiation between Hamas militants and innocent civilians. If these officials have the ability to authorize airstrikes, then civilian targets may appear as fair game. In sum, ideology alters strategic perception.

Poor strategy: The IDF may be targeting civilians in the misguided hope this will deter future support for Hamas. While there is ample evidence that Gazan suffering at the hands of Israel increases support for Hamas, a purely militaristic vision of incentives for altering behavior may result in the counterproductive targeting of civilians. The competing role of Israeli institutions also likely plays a role here. As Brent Sasley argues in an interview, despite the rise of impressive government-sponsored research institutes, the IDF still tends to have the final say. Civilian agencies that may tend to favor more dovish approaches are losing out.

Poor intelligence: While the Israeli government would be loathe to admit it, it’s possible that the IDF consistently lacks the necessary intelligence to consistently strike locations containing Hamas members. Commanders are under pressure both from military superiors and political officials to kill militants, and therefore they frequently launch airstrikes against targets that may be of no military value to appear successful.

Malfunctioning technology: Despite lauding its “pinpoint strikes”, it’s possible Israel does not have the ability to hit the targets it intends to consistently. While I am no expert on military technology, this explanation seems unlikely considering the IDF’s ability to warn homes it is about to bombard. I have not come across a case of the IDF warning a house only for them to then miss.

 

Factors That Prevent Israel From Targeting Civilians

International pressure: The extremely unequal casualty rate from this conflict, combined with significant public evidence of intentional targeting of civilians, provides Israel with a significant incentive to halt deliberate attacks against civilians. Even the United States, Israel’s normally staunch ally, has quickly called for a ceasefire. Israel is already fairly isolated internationally, and it risks becoming even more so.

The remnants of strategy: Simply, removing Hamas militarily will only lead to an even more radical alternative. Prior to the conflict, Hamas was at its weakest point in recent years and its unity deal with Fatah meant it would likely play a subservient role in any future Palestinian government. While political calculation seems to have generally won out over strategical concerns in this conflict, it’s possible those within the Israeli government concerned about the conflict’s bolstering of Hamas are encouraging a lower body count.

Fear of Israeli deaths: While the Israeli government has recently shown itself to be fairly willing to escalate conflict to suit political needs, it may also fear a backlash if too many Israeli soldiers and civilians die in the conflict. Killing Gazan civilians will only increase Hamas attacks, and this presents a dilemma for Israeli politicians and military leaders.

 

Conclusion

While there are factors pulling Israeli military tactics in multiple directions, there is one element that may be doing both simultaneously. Israel’s long-term strategy for dealing with military threats has been an attempt to manage, rather than destroy, them through periodic engagement (or “mowing the grass”, itself a deeply unsettling term). This strategy emerged out of Israel’s earlier conflicts with conventional Arab armies, but Israel is now much stronger and its enemies much weaker. Mowing the grass may have made strategic sense in 1967 and 1973, but in the present day it is highly counterproductive. However, it may be nothing more than strategic inertia that causes Israel to engage in semi-regular medium-intensity conflicts. Killing a few hundred civilians is a part of mowing the grass, and if Israel’s strategic logic does not evolve, a similar conflict will erupt a few years from now.

All of these factors likely play some role in determining Israeli behavior, and I’ll leave it up to those that know more about the conflict than I do to identify the more influential ones.