The Patterns of Conflict Emergence: Developing an Automated Pattern Recognition System for Conflict

Are there recurring patterns in the escalation and emergence of wars? The idea that history may repeat itself is old.

Butrecent advances overcoming methodological and data barriers present an opportunity to identify these recurrencesempirically and to examine whether these patterns can be classified to improve forecasts and inform theories of conflict.

Ipropose to combine new methods—using the shape of the sequence of events rather than its raw values—and novel dataon conflict from finance, diplomatic cables, and newspapers, to extract typical pre-war motifs.

Just as DNA sequencing hasbeen critical to medical diagnoses, PaCE aims to diagnose international politics by uncovering the relevant patterns in thearea of conflict.

Our goals are to:(i) Identify patterns in the pre-conflict actions using data on conflict events—from the onset of WWI to Hamas’s rocketlaunches—and in their perceptions using data from financial markets (the “crowd’s” perception), news articles (the “experts”),and diplomatic documents (the policy-makers).

This will allow us to evaluate the patterns of escalation over differenttimescales—from the decade to the minute.

The similarity between temporal sequences will be measured using algorithmswhich allow for flexible matching, such as Dynamic Time Warping.(ii) Evaluate the utility of these patterns to improve forecasts of conflict with both historical and live out-of-samplepredictions. Our results, using shape-based classification methods, will be made public and evaluated in real time.

Moreover,using new measures of complexity to distinguish regular, chaotic, and random behavior, I will measure possible fundamentallimits to the predictability of conflict events.(iii) Summarize the core features of dangerous patterns into motifs—recurring patterns—that can help build newtheories of conflict emergence and escalation.

PaCE will build a repository of shapes—a grammar of patterns—to be usedas the building blocks of new theories.