Welcome to the 2021 Conflict Early Warning/Early Action Practitioners Workshop

The average level of peacefulness deteriorated for the ninth time in twelve years. The nature of conflict is transforming across the world. From 2011 to 2016, armed conflicts around the world resulted in over 100,000 deaths per year, which is three times more than the previous five years. While deaths from terrorism keep falling, far-right terrorism increased 250 percent in the last five years. It is, therefore, no surprise that governments, NGOs, academia, and intergovernmental organizations have continued to invest in early warning and conflict/violence prediction tools, alongside robust early response mechanisms.

Yet the information space is changing so quickly that it threatens to leave many early warning/early action (EWEA) efforts behind. Availability of big data, including easy access to what people say and do online, combined with advanced computational capacity, opens a potential for the EWEA community to use the momentum and advance their field further. We believe that an important step in achieving this goal is exchanging the lessons and latest efforts transparently between actors and regions. With this goal, we are facilitating this workshop as an open space for this exchange to happen.

The event will build on the recent conclusions of the “Data for Peacebuilding and Prevention: Ecosystem Mapping Report,” which mentions the application of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) in EWEA systems as one of the cutting-edge approaches on the horizon, with the potential to re-energize the field of early warning. The transparency in data and models can foster dialogue about the development of data-driven approaches and build trust with users. This is why this event aims to bring more visibility to specific advancements in the early warning and conflict prediction field, with the specific idea to share global lessons from different continents and regions, and different actors.

The event will offer a space to share lessons learned on models of early action. In recent years—and in response to criticism that early action is not working—many actors have rethought their early action approaches, trying to create mechanisms that cut across line ministries and/or that open lines of communication between capitals and outlying regions within countries.

Objectives

The overall objective is to facilitate peer-to-peer exchange on best practices in EWEA. The event will bring together at the international level (for the first time) national actors working on early warning/early action to share lessons learned on effective models, practices, and methods to influence decision making and enable conflict prevention on the ground. It will also help to establish networks and create opportunities for capacity building with data visualization tools. Substantively, the conference will shed the light on advanced techniques with the greatest potential to revolutionize the field. Through our data challenge, we aim to provide some initial capacity building and test the format for future capacity building models in the D4PP framework.

Format

This conference will:

Create an online space across different time zones and voices around the world to discuss the latest developments in EWEA
Open opportunities for knowledge cross-fertilization
Offer hands-on experience in working with advanced data-driven methodologies
Improve capacity to implement data-driven action for preventive, early action for peace and security of key civil society organizations, multilateral organizations, and governments

More specifically, the event will provide a combination of expert panel discussions, workshops, online pitches, and collaborative DataKind Discovery Day.

The conference is co-organized by the NYU Center on International Cooperation and partners.