Predictive Societal Indicators of Radicalism
In collaboration with our academic partners Prof. Cingranelli at the Political Science Department, SUNY Binghamton University and Profs. Sam Bell and Amanda Murdie at the Department of Political Science, Kansas State University, we developed a Domestic Political Violence Model that forecasts political violence levels five years into the future. The model enables policymakers, particularly in the COCOMs, to proactively plan for instances of increased domestic political violence, with implications for resource allocation and intelligence asset assignment. Our model uses the IDEA dataset for political event coding, plus numerous indicators from the CIRI Human Rights Dataset, Polity IV Dataset, World Bank, OECD, Correlates of War project, and Fearon and Laitin datasets.
Here is our model’s forecast for 2010 – 2014 as a ranked list:
1. Iran . 2. Sri Lanka . 3. Russia . 4. Georgia . 5. Israel . 6. Turkey . 7. Burundi . 8. Chad . 9. Honduras . 10. Czech Republic . 11. China . 12. Italy . 13. Colombia . 14. Ukraine . 15. Indonesia . 16. Malaysia . 17. Jordan . 18. Mexico . 19. Kenya . 20. South Africa . 21. Ireland . 22. Peru . 23. Chile . 24. Armenia . 25. Tunisia . 26. Democratic Republic of the Congo . 27. Belarus . 28. Argentina . 29. Albania . 30. Ecuador . 31. Sudan . 32. Austria . 33. Nigeria . 34. Syria . 35. Kyrgyz Republic . 36. Egypt . 37. Belgium
Phi Beta Iota: This is fascinating but insufficient. While making the obvious point about the Internet and cell phones making the coordination of protests much easier (Kuwaiti women doing flash mobs remain our favorite), it does not provide a good over-lay against dictatorships, two-party or one-party tyrannies, the divide between the rich 1% and poor 99%, or the radical changes in food and water and energy prices as a separate subset. We also find the allocation of intelligence assets especially misleading, since there is nothing intelligent about most government intelligence networks–instead of providing decision-support on how to achieve a prosperous nation at peace, they are used instead to obsess on anyone daring to question higher authority that has lost all legitimacy. Where we hope to see all this go is in the direction of massive non-violence general strikes–put the rich into grid-lock by withdrawing the custom of the poor for everything. The times they are a-changing.
