Common indicators hurt armed conflict prediction

Abstract

Are big conflicts different from small or medium size conflicts? To answer this question, we leverage fine-grained conflict data, which we map to climate, geography, infrastructure, economics, raw demographics, and demographic composition in Africa. With an unsupervised learning model, we find three overarching conflict types representing ``major unrest,'' ``local conflict,'' and ``sporadic and spillover events.'' Major unrest predominantly propagates around densely populated areas with well-developed infrastructure and flat, riparian geography. Local conflicts are in regions of median population density, are diverse socio-economically and geographically, and are often confined within country borders. Finally, sporadic and spillover conflicts remain small, often in low population density areas, with little infrastructure and poor economic conditions. The three types stratify into a hierarchy of factors that highlights population, infrastructure, economics, and geography, respectively, as the most discriminative indicators. Specifying conflict type negatively impacts the predictability of conflict intensity such as fatalities, conflict duration, and other measures of conflict size. The competitive effect is a general consequence of weak statistical dependence. Hence, we develop an empirical and bottom-up methodology to identify conflict types, knowledge of which can hurt predictability and cautions us about the limited utility of commonly available indicators.