Beyond the Canon: New UN Tool Suggests Broader Base for Thinking about Atrocity Prevention

Posted on November 13, 2014 by

Guest post by Alex Zucker, coeditor of Reconstructing Atrocity Prevention, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

In a small but meaningful gesture, the photographs on the cover of the UN’s new framework of analysis for assessing the risk of genocide and other mass atrocities go beyond what I call the genocide canon—the cases of Armenia, the Holocaust, Rwanda, Srebrenica, and, of late, Darfur that are typically cited to prick people’s conscience and spur action by policymakers—to include images from East Timor, Guatemala, and Cambodia [see below; captions are on page ii of the document]. This expansion matters because, up to now, policy for the prevention of atrocities and activism to raise awareness of them have been based largely on a tiny sample of past genocides in which there seems to be a clear-cut distinction between “good guys” and “bad guys,” and the narrowness of that sample has constrained thinking about prevention in the present.

To cite just two recent examples:

 * In the United States, the Holocaust continues to be central in activist and policy discourse about atrocity prevention and response. The most recent and striking example of this was the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s exhibition of photographs in October, documenting atrocities from the conflict in Syria. Although the Museum itself did not liken the atrocities committed by the Assad regime to those committed by the Nazis under Hitler, the fact that it chose to host the exhibition was enough to invite the comparison. In any case, most media coverage made the connection. Likewise, in September 2013, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, in a Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearing on Syria, made reference to the Holocaust in comments urging Congress to support the use of force in response to the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons.

 * UN officials and policymakers also rely on the canon to make the case for greater commitment to atrocity prevention and response by member states. On the 20th anniversary of Rwanda’s genocide, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon gave a speech in April in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, saying “The international community failed the people of Rwanda 20 years ago.  And we are at risk of not doing enough for the people of the Central African Republic today. [. . .] From here I go to Rwanda to mark the twentieth commemoration of the Rwanda genocide.  It is your responsibility as leaders to ensure that there no such anniversaries in this country.”

It isn’t that the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide are undeserving of commemoration or unproductive to consider in thinking about how to prevent atrocity crimes, but there are many other examples that are routinely ignored. Unsurprisingly, these omitted cases tend to be ones that exhibit greater moral ambiguity, or that might reflect poorly on those drawing the comparisons. The choice of East Timor and Guatemala as illustrations for the new framework of analysis is especially conspicuous, given that criticism of U.S. policy on genocide/atrocity prevention has zeroed in on these very cases. As one reviewer of Samantha Power’s 2002 “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide pointed out, the argument that the United States has historically been a bystander to genocide, and that U.S. policymakers need to be more interventionist in their response to atrocities, ignores the cases of Indonesia, East Timor, and Guatemala, where the U.S. role was “less that of a bystander and more that of a partner-in-crime perpetrator.”

On the other hand, conspicuous for its absence among the illustrations is Sri Lanka. That country is currently under investigation by the UN Human Rights Council for events in 2009, at the end of a civil war in which there is evidence that both sides committed crimes against humanity and war crimes. I say conspicuous because the United Nations was subjected to heavy criticism for its terrible failure to protect civilians during the conflict, and its unrolling of the “Rights Up Front” initiative last December was a direct response to those critiques.

In short, which cases are included in the genocide canon matters, even if those cases are being used purely for symbolic purposes and not researched for facts and patterns. Expansion of that canon—especially with instances where a simple “good guys versus bad guys” analysis does not apply—increases the chances that individuals and institutions will advocate for, and produce, more effective atrocities-prevention policies.

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Atrocities Early Warning Q&A: Bridget Conley-Zilkic

Posted on November 8, 2014 by

Bridget Conley-Zilkic is research director at the World Peace Foundation and assistant professor of research at Tufts University’s The Fletcher School. From 2001 to 2011, she worked on issues related to contemporary genocide at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. -JU

1. With your colleague Alex de Waal, you’ve written about how mass atrocities end. Most work in this field focuses on how and why mass atrocities start. What spurred you to look differently at this subject?

Alex first brought up the question of endings years ago, in relation to his experiences in the Nuba Mountains in the 1990s, where, contrary to all expectations, the Nuba managed to protect themselves against a genocidal onslaught. This insight sparked the question of how do mass atrocities actually end—a question that the literature had not really asked. While there has been rigorous exploration of onset and patterns of violence, when it comes to endings most work hastily summarizes the decline in actual cases. When it comes to policy or theorizing endings the dominant approach is to focus on “us” and what we responses we ought to develop. We decided that an exploration of variation and patterns in endings would prove a fruitful avenue for research.

2. What did you find in that work, and what are the main implications for efforts to prevent or mitigate mass atrocities?

There are several important implications. For now, I want to draw out two related conundrums.

First, we must acknowledge that overall trends in declines in mass atrocity in globally and in distinct regions do not necessarily conform with the types of actions that generally populate the “toolbox” for atrocity response. In Asia, for instance, large-scale assault against civilians declined in tandem with strenuous claims for sovereignty and non-interference. We have seen a similar pattern in many distinct cases not just in large trends. This suggests that ending atrocities should not be treated as synonymous with advancing political rights. We need to question the assumption that these two valuable goals necessarily go together.

Second, as is well-documented by a range of researchers, the most acute threats to civilians come when governments perpetrate intentional violence against them. The large-scale, systematic campaigns that catalyzed research, policy and advocacy almost all arose in the context of a governmental persecution. Bosnia is an obvious deviation from this, but even there, the Bosnian Serbs had significant backing from neighboring Serbia. The irony that our work is revealing, however, is that governments remain crucial to ending violence and consolidating peace, this can include even predatory governments.

These two insights suggest that while it is very easy to designate campaigns of violence against civilians as heinous and an assault on human conscience, it is much more difficult to translate the purity of that ethical insight into action of equal ethical clarity—even if, or perhaps especially if, the goal is to halt violence.

3. What are you working on now?

The how mass atrocities end project involved a couple years of research and is coming to fruition. We will have some publications coming out over the next year that will document our work: in-depth research on patterns of endings in Bosnia, Sudan, Indonesia, Iraq, Burundi and Guatemala; our quantitative comparative endings project; and broader reflections on the current state of study and policy related to mass atrocities. There is a lot of work left to do to finish these up. As I imagine my research beyond these projects, I keep thinking I won’t do another atrocities related project, but who knows? As difficult a topic as it can be to study, it is equally difficult to let go of.

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A Progress Report on Peace Talks in Colombia

Posted on November 4, 2014 by

Guest post by Michael Weintraub, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Binghamton University.

An article in the Economist, “The Dogs Bark in Colombia,” details the intransigence of both Álvaro Uribe (a former president and the leader of right-wing opposition to the peace talks) and the FARC’s leaders, which has the potential to derail negotiations. Coupled with the slow pace of talks, evidence that elements of the Colombian military have been spying on human rights defenders, journalists, and politicians involved in the peace process, and continued armed confrontations between insurgents and the government, there remain formidable challenges to reaching a peace agreement that would end the conflict. There are, however, some positive developments to report.

First, groups of victims continue to be heard in Havana. These interactions, whether directly or indirectly, have led to the recent recognition by the FARC that they have created victims in the conflict. As noted on the opinion pool website, this is a watershed event and should give us increased confidence that an agreement will eventually be signed. Why would the FARC admit to such crimes unless there were some benefit that would accrue to its leaders and members at the end?

Second, the negotiations proceed apace. Indeed, because of the slow pace (and domestic political pressure for demonstrated “wins”) two items on the agenda are being negotiated simultaneously. This probably increases the likelihood that an agreement will be reached more quickly, although if the past is any prelude, that still means many months of talks.

Third, the recently-created “historical clarification commission” is working to provide an independent assessment of the origins and dynamics of the conflict, which will feed into the talks. The commission is composed primarily of academics and could either have a stabilizing or destabilizing effect on the talks, depending upon what is found and reported. It is unlikely that anything particularly damning to either side will be revealed, given that this is well-trod territory.

Fourth, representation from some of the most violent sub-units within the FARC have made appearances in Havana. This may increase the likelihood that an agreement will be reached (althoughmore veto players engaged in the talks challenges that notion) and, if it does, that the FARC will be able to avoid fragmentation in a post-conflict environment.

In short, while there are positive signs, cautious optimism should remain. The chances that an agreement will be concluded before January 1, 2015 – which is the deadline for the question in our opinion pool – are, frankly, quite low. These negotiations will take time, and there are simply too many moving parts to think that they can be wrapped up before the year’s end.

Ed.: Since late 2013, the Early Warning Project has been running a question on its opinion pool about the prospects for a peace deal before 2015. This post originally appeared as a comment on that question inside the opinion pool. A plot of the crowd’s aggregate forecast over the question’s run to date is shown below. You can see Michael’s previous Early Warning Project blog post on this topic here.

colombia.opinionpool.plot.20141103

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Shifting Risks in Burkina Faso

Posted on November 2, 2014 by

By Jay Ulfelder, Early Warning Project director

The man who ruled Burkina Faso for 27 years fell from office a few days ago, and the contours of the transition that will follow remain unclear. The Early Warning Project’s statistical risk assessments suggest that this tumult has roughly doubled the risk of an onset of state-led mass killing in Burkina Faso for the next year or more, likely pushing it into the top 30 when those estimates are next updated in early 2015. The several area experts we consulted in the past 48 hours, however, all indicated that this worst-case scenario was highly unlikely to happen. Instead, they seemed guardedly optimistic that Burkina Faso would find its way to a competitively elected civilian government without substantial civilian bloodshed before 2016.

Burkina Faso’s long-standing authoritarian regime had faced significant popular unrest before, most recently in 2011, but the bout that finally pushed President Blaise Compaoré from office began in earnest last Tuesday. On that day, hundreds of thousands marched in the streets of the capital Ouagadougou to denounce plans to remove term limits so that Compaoré—in office since a 1987 coup—could stand for and almost certainly retain his post for several more years. Demonstrations persisted in spite of intensified efforts to disperse them. On Thursday, crowds stormed the country’s parliament building, state television and radio studios, and the homes of high regime officials. The head of the country’s military announced the dissolution of government and parliament and the start of a one-year transition period, but Compaoré asserted he would lead that transition. On Friday, demonstrators responded by surging back into the streets to demand that the president go.

Protesters in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, on October 31, 2014 (photo credit: Joe Penney)

Under that unrelenting pressure, Compaoré finally obliged, and military chief of staff Gen. Honoré Traoré announced that he would lead the transition instead. The lieutenant colonel who heads the Presidential Guard soon took to the airwaves to declare himself interim president, however, and on Saturday the country’s military leaders publicly endorsed that putsch. A loose coalition of opposition parties and non-governmental organizations has since demanded that civilians be allowed to lead the transition, saying in a public statement that “the success of the uprising—and therefore the leadership of the transition—belongs to the people and should not be confiscated by the army.”

It is impossible to foresee with confidence how this situation will evolve from here, but we can explore how this breakdown and its aftermath could affect the risk of mass atrocities in Burkina Faso. Our statistical models give us one way to do that. By manipulating relevant inputs to those models and seeing how the likelihood of an onset of state-led mass killing changes in response, we can try to reduce the blurriness a little bit.

The bottom line from that exercise is that state-led mass killing remains unlikely under all relevant scenarios, but our statistical models do suggest that the risk of lethal atrocities on this scale has roughly doubled, probably pushing Burkina Faso into the top 30 worldwide.

Surprisingly, this result does not depend on whether or not the events of the past few days qualify as a coup attempt, and if so, whether or not that attempt succeeds. Instead, a prompt transition to democracy would have a similar effect on our risk estimate. This result does not imply that a newly elected government would be prone to engage in mass killing, although that possibility can never be ruled out. A more likely pathway runs through the breakdown of that new democracy or onset of violent conflict during or after its establishment. The problem is that political instability often persists once it starts, and the ensuing struggles for power can create motive and opportunity for political violence that appeared unthinkable under previous routines.

That’s what the statistical models and the global comparative perspective it reflects tell us, anyway. The handful of area experts I consulted in the past few days were uniformly more optimistic. All of them said that they expected a return to elected civilian rule in Burkina Faso before 2016 (see here for an assenting elaboration on that point), and they all rated mass atrocities as highly unlikely. One noted the country’s history of bloodless coups—before Compaoré’s 27-year run, Burkina Faso ranked among Africa’s most coup-prone countries—and a few pointed to the absence of the kinds of ethnic rivalries that often devolve into large-scale violence when politics turns fluid. The one who quantified his assessment put the risk of mass atrocities in the coming year at just 5 percent.

The uniformity of that guarded optimism is encouraging, and it suggests that our statistical models may be overstating the increase in risk associated with the tilt to instability in this particular case. Nonetheless, the revised forecasts suggests that it would be prudent to keep a closer eye on the risk of mass atrocities in Burkina Faso during and after this transitional period. One way the Early Warning Project can do that is with a question on our expert opinion pool, and we have now opened one accordingly. When the project’s public website finally launches later this fall, you will be able to track how our pool of forecasters sees that risk changing (or not) in real time over the coming year.

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Ebola’s Potential Effects on the Risk of Mass Atrocities in Guinea

Posted on October 16, 2014 by

By Jay Ulfelder, Early Warning Project director

One of the countries hit hardest by this year’s Ebola epidemic, Guinea, is also one of the countries most susceptible to an onset of state-led mass killing, according to our statistical risk assessments. This conjunction is not entirely accidental. And, while the Ebola epidemic almost certainly won’t lead directly to mass atrocities, the effects the epidemic is having on Guinea’s political economy could indirectly increase that risk in coming months.

Guinea is one of three neighboring West African countries in which the current Ebola epidemic is concentrated; Liberia and Sierra Leone are the other two (see the map from the Economist below). According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO), as of October 12 (here), Guinea has seen nearly 1,500 cases of Ebola infection, and 843 of those infected have died. Worrisome, the WHO also stated in a mid-October situation report that “there is evidence of an increase in the intensity of transmission in Guinea.” The number of new confirmed cases in the capital, Conakry, had declined from the previous week, but outlying districts continue to record higher and sometimes increasing transmission rates, and the disease is still spreading to new areas.

economist.ebola.map

The Early Warning Project’s statistical assessments for 2014 (here) rank Guinea tenth in the world on the risk of a new episode of state-led mass killing, on par with Iraq, Afghanistan, and Nigeria. In Guinea’s case, that high ranking stems mostly from its high susceptibility to coup attempts. Coup attempts may spur incumbent rulers to use any available means to quash threats to their power, and rulers who seize office through successful coups sometimes use mass violence against their ousted rivals in an effort to consolidate their power.

Guinea’s risk profile is also increased by the political salience of ruling elites’ ethnicity, and by its recent history of state-perpetrated mass atrocities. The historical data set we use to train our statistical models identifies an episode of state-led mass killing in Guinea that ran from soon after independence until the early 1980s, in the form of political repression under Sekou Toure (see here for more on those data and here for more on state repression under Toure). In 2009, Guinea also saw another incident that was not lethal enough to represent a “mass killing” under our coding rules but certainly qualified as a mass atrocity. As Human Right Watch described in a September 2013 report,

On September 28, 2009, several hundred members of Guinea’s security forces burst into a stadium in Guinea’s capital, Conakry, and opened fire on tens of thousands of opposition supporters peacefully gathered there. By late afternoon, at least 150 Guineans lay dead or dying, and dozens of women had suffered brutal sexual violence, including individual and gang rape.

Guinea is a coup-prone country, in part, because it is a very poor country with a hollow state. Those same characteristics also make it more vulnerable to outbreaks of infectious diseases, including Ebola. As Anita Schroven describes in a recent post on Cultural Anthropology’s Hot Spots blog, in Guinea,

Central government agents are often seen as foreign elements all over the countryside, not only in the Forest Region. They rarely leave administrative centers, and if they do, it is to accompany an NGO campaign or police mission. Beyond the increase of ethnicized rhetoric in national politics (which dramatically increased during the 2010 and 2013 national elections) the general population perceives these agents as foreign elements because government agents are so rarely present and are largely associated with the remote governing elite in Conakry…

This ever-weakening everyday state capacity (according to a Weberian notion of state) reveals itself in public service provisions, or rather the lack thereof. Public (health) infrastructure is barely on working levels and is currently not only under pressure from the Ebola virus disease but also from outbreaks of measles and meningitis—two of the many periodically reoccurring and deadly illnesses that have been met with comparatively swift and routine responses by a collaboration of respective line ministries and NGOs.

It is hard to imagine a scenario in which the Ebola epidemic leads directly to a spate of deliberate civilian killings by state agents or groups acting at their behest. It is much easier to imagine the Ebola epidemic contributing to an economic crisis that exacerbates the risk of coup attempts and other forms of open political conflict. In an early-October report, the World Bank estimated that the Ebola epidemic would shrink Guinea’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 2014 by about 2 percent, and that those costs would rise in 2015 if the epidemic is not quickly contained.

In fact, this economic damage seems to be occurring already. According to Schroven,

Economic consequences [of the Ebola epidemic] on the macro-economic level are beginning to be felt. Projections for economic growth are slumping with mining companies slowing or closing their operations, therefore limiting the government elite’s revenues. The fear of Guineans traveling to neighboring countries can be felt on all levels, including the hampering of vital cross-border trade in staple food stuffs that affects people’s subsistence and their national pride. Upset Guinean voices are calling the government into further action to both intervene in the negative image Guinea has been gaining from being identified as the origin of the amorphous threat and to protect the precarious economic situation most citizens find themselves in.

This crisis finally gives the impression that it cannot be as easily weathered by the Guinean government as other political, economic or health upheavals, which have in the past so often run their course without necessitating changes in state performance.

Earlier this week, WHO director Margaret Chan spoke ominously of the potential knock-on effects of the West African Ebola outbreak. “I have never seen a health event threaten the very survival of societies and governments in already very poor countries,” the BBC reported her as saying. “I have never seen an infectious disease contribute so strongly to potential state failure.”

As political scientist Laura Seay argued in a recent pair of tweets (here and here), the Guinean state is unlikely to collapse under the weight of Ebola, but crises short of state collapse could be significant enough. Even though it is a relatively high-risk case, a new episode of state-led mass killing probably won’t happen in Guinea soon. Still, our statistical assessments show that Guinea’s risk is not negligible, and the Ebola epidemic is damaging the country’s political economy in ways that are only likely to increase it.

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Why Isn’t State-Led Mass Killing Occurring in Russia’s North Caucasus?

Posted on October 8, 2014 by

By Jay Ulfelder, Early Warning Project director.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the Russian government defeated a separatist insurgency in Chechnya with a scorched-earth campaign that killed thousands of civilians and displaced hundreds of thousands more. Despite that ostensible victory, Russia continues to battle separatist insurgents in its North Caucasus region, of which Chechnya is a part (see the map below). According to the independent news site Caucasian Knot (here), from 2010 to 2013 this conflict killed more than 2,700 people, approximately 1,500 of whom were civilians. The group leading the separatist insurgency in its current form, the Caucasus Emirate, has also committed several major terrorist attacks in Moscow and elsewhere, and in early 2014 its leader publicly called on militants to attack the Sochi Olympics (see here).

Russia’s North Caucasus region (map via RFE/RL)

The persistence of this insurgency and its success in carrying out significant attacks elsewhere in Russia raises an awkward question: Why hasn’t the same regime that perpetrated a state-led mass killing in Chechnya done the same in its fight against the substantial insurgency that persists?

I recently emailed a few experts on political violence and civil conflict in Russia to ask them about this puzzle. In their responses, a couple of them wondered if it was even a puzzle at all, suggesting that Russian forces may already be committing atrocities in the North Caucasus that amount to state-led mass killing. Jason Lyall, a professor of political science at Yale University who studies civil wars and conducted field research in the region in the early 2000s, told me that:

Ingushetia and Dagestan have both recorded at least 1,000 civilian deaths since 2001 just from state authorities. Media coverage on this is terrible, but the local authorities in both Ingushetia and Dagestan have been “disappearing” young males as a matter of policy throughout the 1999-now era. (Which is one reason the insurgencies keep going rather than get stamped out).

In short, depending on the definition of mass killing temporally/spatially, I’d say we might actually still be witnessing it, at least until recently, though not on the scale of the Second (or First) Chechen War.

Kristin Bakke, a senior lecturer in politics and international relations at University College London who studies political violence, including Russia’s civil wars, made a similar point:

There is still widespread civilian victimization ongoing [in the North Caucasus], even if it is not to the extent that it was in the second war in Chechnya. I also worry that there is massive under-reporting on this matter, given how [Ramzan] Kadyrov now has free reigns to rule Chechnya more or less as he pleases.

Bakke’s and Lyall’s remarks about the persistence of atrocities in the North Caucasus are echoed in a background briefing written earlier this year by the Council on Foreign Relations’ Zachary Laub for PBS Newshour. According to Laub,

Security officials maintain broad authority to declare counterterrorist operations, which allow them to operate with few restrictions. Rights groups still allege killings, disappearances, and torture by Russian security forces, as well as collective punishment of families of suspects and excessive force that often causes civilian casualties.

Still, all of the experts I consulted agreed that Russia has not attacked the current insurgency as aggressively as it prosecuted the war in Chechnya. None of them claims to fully understand why that’s true, but all three said that necessity, or the lack thereof, has something to do with it. Monica Duffy Toft, a professor of government and public policy at Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, who studies ethnic and religious civil wars in Russia and elsewhere, wrote:

I don’t think it’s an issue of capacity since Russia basically obliterated Grozny two times in war since 1994. So, it has to be a matter of intention—it is not interested perhaps due to sanctioning by the international community (from 1999-2008 it seemed to care what the world thought) or it doesn’t/didn’t feel it was needed to do so en masse since it was good enough at sweep operations, targeted arrests and assassinations during the wars.

Lyall’s explanation expanded on that latter idea:

There hasn’t been mass killing on the scale of Chechnya, for two reasons (at least). One is the demonstration effect that Chechnya had on the local populations; no one, including insurgents, is willing to risk open confrontation with the Russian state in Dagestan or Ingushestia. The insurgency keeps a fairly low profile, and the local authorities are quite strong, so there’s no need to repress civilians since most don’t actively support the insurgency.

Second, in all three locations—Ingushetia, Dagestan, and Chechnya—the insurgents are largely confined to rural non-populated areas (i.e., forested mountains) that are isolated away from the republic centers. There’s no need to conduct large scale repression in these areas in part because there’s no large populations out there. These areas also represent a small [percentage] of the overall space of each republic, so each insurgency is pretty confined to a small, non-populated space, which has to lower the odds of observing mass killing.

Bakke echoed that necessity-based argument and pointed out that two other drivers of the violence in Chechnya—racism in Russia against people from the North Caucasus and sympathy among foreign governments for crackdowns on groups with ties to international terrorism—were still present today, so we can’t explain the difference in strategies through changes in them. She also made an interesting point about variation over time in the professionalism of Russian security forces:

Since 2007 Russia has been undergoing a process of military reform, aimed at—among other things—creating a more professional and less corrupt army, although some question the extent to which this has been a success. One report also suggests that in Dagestan, one of the hotbeds in the North Caucasus, President Magomedsalam Magomedov from 2010 to 2013 pioneered a “softer” approach to law enforcement, but after his dismissal, by Putin, mass arrests picked up. I.e. there is some evidence to suggest that the level of mass killings in the region are associated with both discipline of the armed forces and the guidelines for the local law enforcement agencies, but more empirical research is needed to establish the effect.

Given what Bakke, Lyall, and others say about the persistence of atrocities in the region, it certainly doesn’t make sense to describe the absence of overt state-led mass killing in the North Caucasus as a preventive success. At the same time, none of these experts seemed to expect the situation to worsen sharply any time soon.

Consistent with those views, the Early Warning Project’s statistical risk assessments do not identify Russia as a country at relatively high risk of an onset of state-led mass killing. Russia currently ranks 82nd among the 162 countries we assess, placing it in the large pool of cases with estimated risks hovering close to zero. Since late 2013, we have also been asking our expert opinion pool to assess the risk of an onset of state-led mass killing in the North Caucasus region before the end of this year. As the plot below shows, the aggregate forecast from that pool ticked up a bit ahead of the Sochi Olympics but never exceeded 13 percent and has receded slightly since the spring. In short, in spite of the persistent insurgency and recent history of mass atrocities perpetrated by the same regime, neither our statistical models nor our opinion pool foresees a sharp escalation of state-led atrocities in the North Caucasus in the near future.

ewp russia north caucasus opinion pool plot 20141008

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Zimbabwe Simmers

Posted on October 2, 2014 by

This week, the International Crisis Group issued a new briefing on Zimbabwe that portrays a country on simmer. “Zimbabwe is an insolvent and failing state,” writes ICG Africa Program director Comfort Ero, “its politics zero sum, its institutions hollowing out, and its once vibrant economy moribund.” Without significant changes of course in economic policy and elite behavior, the report warns, the risk of a sharper crisis and deeper collapse will continue to grow.

Our analysis largely accords with ICG’s. The Early Warning Project’s statistical risk assessments put Zimbabwe among the 30 countries at greatest risk of an onset of state-led mass killing, but barely. Zimbabwe ranks 28th, in the same range as Chad, Angola, Algeria, and Malawi. That ranking suggests a country with the structural potential for mass killing but not the overt crises that usually beget them.

Our expert opinion pool also has one question running on Zimbabwe. In late August, we asked our forecasters, “Before 1 January 2015, will violent conflict abruptly produce a new displacement crisis in Zimbabwe?” For purposes of this question, “displacement crisis” is defined as the displacement of 5,000 or more persons, and a crisis is considered to have occurred “abruptly” when those 5,000 or more persons are displaced within a seven-day period. Since the question opened, the aggregate forecast has hovered at about 4 percent. We asked identical questions about Kenya, Ethiopia, and Guinea, and the forecasts for all of those have run higher so far (currently 12, 8, and 6 percent, respectively).

Also consistent with ICG’s analysis, our statistical models imply that the risk of state-led mass killing in Zimbabwe would increase significantly if the factional struggles within the ruling ZANU-PF party were to break into the open with a coup attempt or the eruption of armed conflict. The possibilities of these events are not remote. As ICG observes,

Despite visibly waning capacities, 90-year-old Robert Mugabe shows no sign of wanting to leave office. The succession battle within his party is presented as a two-way race between Vice President Joice Mujuru and Justice Minister Emmerson Mnangagwa, but the reality is more complex. Public battles have intensified, with intimidation and violence a disquieting feature. Mugabe’s diminished ability to manage this discord will be severely tested ahead of its December National People’s Congress.

Our statistical risk assessments won’t be updated again until the spring of 2015. In the meantime, though, our opinion-pool question on the risk of a displacement crisis offers one way to track change in the risk of wider conflict in Zimbabwe. We will also be adding a raft of questions about risks of mass killing onsets before 2016 to the opinion pool later this fall and will be sure to include Zimbabwe in that set.

-JU

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