Early-Warning Organisations

Conflict Prevention Centre
The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe's Conflict Prevention Centre set up the Operations Planning Unit to serve as a planning cell for future missions and field operations, and to identify potential crisis areas by providing early warning and analysis. It works very closely with the Mission Programme Section. The OPU's enhances the early warning capacity of both the OSCE Secretariat and the Chairmanship, providing them with background and analysis papers on various issues of concern to the Organization.
http://www.osce.org/cpc/13365.html

CrisisWatch
The International Crisis Group's concise monthly bulletin; offers updates on violent or potentially violent situations world-wide. Contains trends of deterioration, improvement or stasis; and watch list for both escalation and resolution potential. Archive of monthly updates from 2003.
http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=1200&l=1

European Union
In relation to early warning and as foreseen in the EU programme for the Prevention of Violent Conflicts: http://www.eu2001.se/static/eng/pdf/violent.PDF
the European Commission has developed a check list for root causes of conflict/early warning indicators to increase awareness within the EU decision making forums of the problems of those countries/regions with the highest assessed risk of an outbreak, continuation or re-emergence of conflict.
http://europa.eu.int/comm/external_relations/cpcm/cp/list.htm

FAST International Early Warning Program - Swisspeace
Intended to enhance decision-makers' ability identify critical developments using quantitative and qualitative analysis & Local Information Networks (LIN's) so strategies can be formulated to either prevent or limit violent conflicts. Currently developing a reliable quantitative forecasting model to predict future incidences of violent conflict based on the unique FAST dataset; Offering training and consultancy on early warning and conflict analysis; standardized updates or tailored Country Risk Profiles.
http://www.swisspeace.org/fast/default.htm

Genocide Watch
Hague-based organization which posts genocide and politicide alerts as they arise.
http://www.genocidewatch.org/

High Commissioner on National Minorities (Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE)
The High Commissioner's task is to provide early warning and, as appropriate, early action in regard to tensions involving national minority issues which have not yet developed beyond an early warning stage, but have the potential to develop into a conflict within the OSCE area.
http://www.osce.org/hcnm/

Humanitarian Early Warning Service (HEWS)
The Inter-Agency Standing Committee's (IASC) HEWSweb currently covers mainly natural disasters, its next development phase (2005) will allow for the consolidation and further enhancement of such as well as for the development of the socio-political pages.
http://www.hewsweb.org/home_page/default.asp

United Nations Development Program
Conflict Prevention page details early-warning work that the UNDP is attempting to mainstream into its development mandate.
http://www.undp.org/bcpr/conflict_prevention/index.htm

United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)
OCHA's Early Warning Unit identifies, monitors and analyzes trends and developments that may push states/regions toward a humanitarian crisis and, possibly, toward failure. The Unit does so by working in tandem with various UN departments and programmes and with international NGOs, think tanks, civil society groups, and regional organisations.
http://ochaonline.un.org/webpage.asp?Page=919

West Africa Network for Peacebuilding - WARN

Based on the WANEP network of civil society peacebuilding organisations spread across west Africa, WARN’s overall objective is to institutionalize a culture of prevention through an appropriate and effective early warning and early response mechanism.
http://www.wanep.org/programs/early_warning.htm

Early-Warning Data & Trend Analysis

Cascon System for Analyzing International Conflict
A computerized history-based conflict analysis system from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The database includes information on 85 post-World War II conflict cases. The history of each case is structured using the Bloomfield-Leiss conflict phase model which has been widely adopted. Substantive expert codings of up to 571 factors in ten categories capture the influence of events and circumstances on the progress of each case toward or away from violence. Users may research and code additional conflict cases for use along with the historical database.
http://web.mit.edu/cascon/

Centre for Systemic Peace
http://members.aol.com/cspmgm/
The CSP trends track general levels of major armed conflict, ethnopolitical rebellion, and regime characteristics in the global system and its several sub-systems annually. Hosts data on: Major Episodes of Political Violence
1946-2004 http://members.aol.com/cspmgm/warlist.htm
Political Instability in Africa http://members.aol.com/cspmgm/PIsud.htm
And Global Conflict Trends such as: refugees & displaced persons, societal capacity & warfare; Global democracy & autocracy; and regional trends in armed conflict & government. http://members.aol.com/cspmgm/conflict.htm

Conflict Early Warning and Response Mechanism (CEWARN)
IGAD (Intergovernmental Authority on Development) resource providing early warning information on cross-border pastoral conflicts currently in Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda. Tracks small-arms proliferation, environmental pressure, conflict mitigation factors and gender-sensitive conflict indicators.
http://www.cewarn.org/index.html

Correlates of War
Pennsylvania State University project which seeks to facilitate the collection, dissemination, and use of accurate and reliable quantitative data in international relations. Hosts datasets on: inter, intra & extra-state wars, national material capabilities, colonial/dependency contiguity, bilateral trade, state system membership, formal alliances, territorial change & intergovernmental organizations.
http://cow2.la.psu.edu/

Country Indicators for Foreign Policy - Carleton University
http://www.carleton.ca/cifp/
Compiles country/theme specific data; the data set provides at-a-glance global overviews, issue-based perspectives and country performance measures. Currently, the data set includes measures of domestic armed conflict, governance and political instability, militarization, religious and ethnic diversity, demographic stress, economic performance, human development, environmental stress, and international linkages. Risk assessment reports, indicator descriptions and reports on early-warning, including:
Assessing Country Risk: creating an index of severity 2001
Early-Warning Methods: Background Report and Methodological Notes 2001
Anticipating State Failure 2000
http://www.carleton.ca/cifp/reports.htm

Facts on International Relations and Security Trends (FIRST)
FIRST is a joint project of the International Relations and Security Network (ISN) and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). The integrated database system contains information from research institutes around the world. It covers international relations and security, such as hard facts on armed conflicts and peace keeping, arms production and trade, military expenditure, armed forces and conventional weapons holding, nuclear weapons, chronology, statistics and other reference data.
http://first.sipri.org/index.php

The Integrated Network for Societal Conflict Research (INSCR)
program at the Center for International Development and Conflict Management (CIDCM), University of Maryland, maintains sites for the Armed Conflict & Intervention, Minorities at Risk, State Failure and Genocide & Politicide projects.
http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/inscr/

International Crisis Behavior Project
Joint University of Maryland & McGill University data archive offers access to the primary data collections from the ICB Project. The newest release of these data (version 5.0, February 2005) contains information on 440 international crises, 32 protracted conflicts, and 970 crisis actors from the end of World War I through 2002.
http://www.icbnet.org/

The Issue Correlates of War (ICOW)
A Florida State University research project that is attempting to collect systematic data on contentious issues in world politics.Contains datasets on territorial, maritime, regime & river claims.
http://garnet.acns.fsu.edu/%7Ephensel/icow.html#current

Uppsala Conflict Database
Established in the mid-1980's the program continuously collects data on armed conflicts. The definitions have gradually been refined primarily to fit requirements of global comparability. The definitions are designed so as to pick up the same phenomenon across time as well as across space. This makes the data useful for systematic studies of the origins of conflict, conflict dynamics and conflict resolution.
http://www.pcr.uu.se/database/index.php

World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators Series
Part of Yale's World Data Analysis Program, containing detailed a massive historical archive of geopolitical information from 19631977, specific focus on prominent countries such as Russia & China.
http://webapp.icpsr.umich.edu/cocoon/ICPSR-SERIES/00060.xml

AlertNet
Reuter's global emergency news service targeted at humanitarian workers, news and regional emergency-specific information, country-profiles, NGO directory, email alerts can be delivered straight to desktop, emergency suppliers' database.
http://www.alertnet.org/index.htm

CE-DAT
The goal of this project is to improve evidence based policy on conflict prevention and response by providing standardized and comprehensive data on the human impact of conflict. The project involves producing an online, publicly accessible database that is a compilation of quantitative and qualitative information from numerous credible sources. In the first phase CE-DAT focusses on 8 priority countries: Afghanistan, Angola, D. R. Congo, Côte d'Ivoire, Ethiopia, Irak, Sierra Leone, Sudan.
http://www.cred.be/cedat/index.htm

CRInfo News
The Conflict Resolution Information Source's news site details today's news arranged by conflict theme.
http://v4.crinfo.org/news.jsp

EM-DAT
Since 1988 the WHO Collaborating Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) has been maintaining an Emergency Events Database - EM-DAT to serve the purposes of humanitarian action. It provides an objective base for vulnerability assessment and priority setting; contains core data on the occurrence and effects of over 12,800 mass disasters in the world from 1900 to present.
http://www.em-dat.net/index.htm

Human Security News Service
A daily bulletin of human security-related news and research from the Human Security Centre at the University of British Columbia. Reports and articles are currently drawn from some 50 online media sources, wire services, and over 100 think tanks and university research centres from around the world. Data sources are constantly being expanded with considerable effort going into finding non-Western sources.
http://www.humansecuritycentre.org/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=18&Itemid=44

International Relations & Security Network (ISN) News
The ISN's news services offer security-related news stories, reference and background information, and analyses every weekday. These resources are also collected in subject-specific dossiers.
http://www.isn.ethz.ch/news/

Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN)
Part of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). IRIN, which was born out of the 1994 crisis in the Great Lakes region of central Africa, pioneered the use of e-mail and web technology to deliver and receive information to and from some of the most remote and underdeveloped places in Africa, cheaply and efficiently. Its reporting focuses on strengthening universal access to timely, strategic and non-partisan information so as to enhance the capacity of the humanitarian community to understand, respond to and avert emergencies. IRIN further supports efforts at conflict resolution and reconciliation by countering misinformation and propaganda.
http://www.irinnews.org/

ReliefWeb
ReliefWeb is the global hub for time-critical humanitarian information on Complex Emergencies, provides daily updates by region & disaster/emergency targetted at humanitarian workers.
http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/dbc.nsf/doc100?OpenForm

Arms Watching: Integrating Small Arms and Light Weapons into the Early Warning of Violent Conflict, Edward Laurence (Ed), International Alert, 1999
http://www.international-alert.org/pdf/pubsec/lw_armswatching.pdf

Behavioral Correlates Of War, 1816-1979, Russell Leng http://ssdc.ucsd.edu/ssdc/icp08606.html

Conflict Early Warning and Early Response for Sub-Saharan Africa John Davies, Summary of Working Draft for CERTI Crisis and Transition Tool Kit, 2002
http://www.certi.org/publications/policy/ewsummary-5.htm

Create a United Nations Genocide Prevention Focal Point and Genocide Prevention Centre, Prof. Gregory Stanton
http://www.genocidewatch.org/UnitedNationsGenocidePreventionFocalPoint.htm

Early and Late Warning by the UN Secretary-General of Threats to the Peace: Article 99 Revisited, A. Walter Dorn 2004
http://www.rmc.ca/academic/gradrech/dorn30_e.html

Early-Warning: an introduction, A. Walter Dorn 2002
http://www.rmc.ca/academic/gradrech/dorn26_e.html

Engendering Early-Warning Mechanisms for Effective Conflict Prevention, Felicity Hill 2003
http://www.peacewomen.org/resources/Early_Warning/HillACCORD.pdf

Gender & Conflict Early-Warning: a framework for action, Susanne Schmeidl & Eugenia Piza-Lopez, 2002
http://action.web.ca/home/cpcc/attach/Ewgender.pdf

Implementing the United Nations Security Council Resolution on Women, Peace and Security: Integrating Gender into Early Warning Systems: Report on First Expert Consultative Meeting, International Alert and Swiss Peace Foundation 2001 http://www.peacewomen.org/resources/Early_Warning/Implementing1325.html

Peace and Conflict 2005: A Global Survey of Armed Conflicts, Self-Determination Movements, and Democracy, Monty G. Marshall and Ted Robert Gurr, 2005
http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/inscr/PC05print.pdf

Thematic Compilation of General Assembly & Economic and Social Council Resolutions - Early Warning, United Nations 2003
http://www.unhcr.ch/

Thesaurus & Glossary of Early-warning & Conflict Prevention Terms, Alex P. Schmid, FEWER (Form on Early Warning & Early Response) (defunct) 1998 http://www.peacewomen.org/resources/Early_Warning/EWFEWER.pdf