About ViEWS

Every month, thousands of people are killed in large-scale political violence. These conflict are highly destructive – beyond the immediate mortality and morbidity, conflicts lead to profound long-term consequences that impede the realisation of sustainable development. They severely hinder growth and poverty reduction, and they have severe detrimental effects on public health with the adverse impacts felt for decades after the shooting stops. Conflict is ‘development in reverse’.  Preventing and containing armed conflict is consequently high on policy-makers’ agenda. Early action, however, requires early warning. With a good understanding of where armed conflict will occur in the near future, for how long it will persist, and how lethal it will be, concerned governments, IGOs, and NGOs may engage in diplomacy efforts, alert the international community about the situation, prepare for humanitarian assistance, and allocate resources where most needed.  This is what ViEWS offers. 

The Violence Early Warning Systen (ViEWS) was created to remedy the problem above and bridge the knowledge gaps concerning areas of risk. The system offers a novel integration of isolated causal factors – identified through decades of peace research – into a theoretically and methodologically consistent forecasting system that is further informed by conflict data spanning nearly 30 years in time. ViEWS systematically monitors all locations at risk and produces uniform probabilistic assessments of the risks of each of three different types of political violence at both the country- and sub-national levels. Coupled with state-of-the-art methodologies and an open-source ideology, the result is an ambitious and objective early-warning system at the frontier of research – a fully transparent system that is continuously developed, tested, and iteratively improved.