Project archive

Browse our ongoing research projects.

VIEWS was selected to develop a global mapping of existing early-warning systems for conflict and natural hazards to assist UNHCR in developing their own internal EWS. 

The Stability and Change project at the Centre for Advanced Study (CAS) aims to develop relevant statistical methods for testing stability, pin-pointing critical junctures when such have occurred, and form a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms of conflict.

The Sahel Predictive Analytics project (Sahel PA) offered the first whole-of-UN system approach that combined machine learning, predictive modelling, and strategic foresight to identify risk hotspots in the Sahel. It was funded by the German Federal Foreign Office and facilitated by UNHCR in support of the office of the UN Special Coordinator for Development in the Sahel, initiated by the High-Level Committee on Programmes (HLCP) and subsequently the Chief Executives Board for Coordination (CEB).

The predecessor of current-day VIEWS; an ERC-funded Advanced Grant project that ran between 2017-2021, the goal of which was to build a pilot early-warning system for fatal political violence in Africa. Called “The political Violence Early-Warning System (ViEWS)”, the pilot was built using what we now refer to as the VIEWS1 (2018-2019) and VIEWS2 (2020-2021) data infrastructures. They leveraged a set of prediction models that generated probabilistic assessments of the likelihood that given conflict thresholds would be met – for each country and 55×55 km location in Africa (and toward the end of the project also for the Middle East). 

A 2020-2022 collaboration with the United Nations Economic and Social Council for West Asia (ESCWA), through which we developed a new forecasting model under the ViEWS2 infrastructure that incorporates data of particular importance to the Arab states. Built as an expansion of the standard ViEWS set-up, the model covers all of Africa and the Middle East. 

“Forecasting fatalities in armed conflict” was a 2021-2022 research project funded with UK Aid from the GRSA fund at the United Kingdom Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (UK FCDO). The project expanded the ViEWS system from dichotomous conflict/no conflict predictions to also forecasting the number of fatalities from state-based armed conflict, providing policy-makers and researchers with the ability to quantify the potential impact and intensity of conflicts.