Håvard Hegre

• Dr. Philos, University of Oslo
• Professor at Uppsala University

Governmental and nongovernmental organizations have increasingly relied on early-warning systems of conflict to support their decisionmaking. Predictions of war intensity as probability distributions prove closer to what policymakers need than point estimates, as they encompass useful representations of both the most likely outcome and the lower-pr...

The detrimental impacts of wars on human development are well documented across research domains, from public health to micro-economics. However, these impacts are studied in compartmentalized silos, which limits a comprehensive understanding of the consequences of conflicts, hampering our ability to effectively sustain human development. This arti...

Forecasting of armed conflicts is an important area of research that has the potential to save lives and prevent suffering. However, most existing forecasting models provide only point predictions without any individual-level uncertainty estimates. In this paper, we introduce a novel extension to conformal prediction algorithm which we call bin-con...

Event datasets including those provided by Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) are based on reports from the media and international organizations, and are likely to suffer from reporting bias. Since the UCDP has strict inclusion criteria, they most likely under-estimate conflict-related deaths, but we do not know by how much. Here, we provide a g...

This draft article outlines a prediction challenge where the target is to forecast the number of fatalities in armed conflicts, in the form of the UCDP `best' estimates, aggregated to the VIEWS units of analysis. It presents the format of the contributions, the evaluation metric, and the procedures, and a brief summary of the contributions. The art...

Protest is a low-intensity form of political conflict that can precipitate intrastate armed conflict. Data on protests should therefore be informative in systems that provide early warnings of armed conflict. However, since most protests do not escalate to armed conflict, we first need theory to inform our prediction models. We identify three theor...

Early warning systems purport to help decision makers act more effectively. But what does it take to develop, deliver and use warnings or predictions for rare and uncertain events in data-poor and rapidly changing environments? What key lessons can be learned from teams who have confronted these challenges over the last 10 years? The paper answers...

Armed conflict and economic growth are inherently coupled; armed conflict substantially reduces economic growth, while economic growth is strongly correlated with a reduction in the propensity of armed conflict. Here, we simulate the incidence of armed conflict and its effect on economic growth simultaneously along the economic pathways defined by...

Recent research on the forecasting of violence has mostly focused on predicting the presence or absence of conflict in a given location, while much less attention has been paid to predicting changes in violence. We organized a prediction competition to forecast changes in state-based violence both for the true future and for a test partition. We re...

This article presents results and lessons learned from a prediction competition organized by ViEWS to improve collective scientific knowledge on forecasting (de-)escalation in Africa. The competition call asked participants to forecast changes in state-based violence for the true future (October 2020–March 2021) as well as for a held-out test parti...

This article presents an update to the ViEWS political Violence Early-Warning System. This update introduces (1) a new infrastructure for training, evaluating, and weighting models that allows us to more optimally combine constituent models into ensembles, and (2) a number of new forecasting models that contribute to improve overall performance, in...

Can we predict civil war? This article sheds light on this question by evaluating 9 years of, at the time, future predictions made by Hegre et al. (2013) in 2011. We evaluate the ability of this study to predict observed conflicts in the 2010–2018 period, using multiple metrics. We also evaluate the original performance evaluation, i.e., whether th...

Conflicts between the interests of biodiversity conservation and other human activities pose a major threat to natural ecosystems and human well-being, yet few methods exist to quantify their intensity and model their dynamics. We develop a categorization of conflict intensity based on the curve of conflict, a model originally used to track the esc...

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted in 2015 integrate diverse issues such as addressing hunger, gender equality and clean energy and set a common agenda for all United Nations member states until 2030. The 17 SDGs interact and by working towards achieving one goal countries may further—or jeopardise—progress on others. However, the dir...

Numerous studies—operating with diverse model specifications, samples and empirical measures—suggest different economic, social, cultural, demographic, institutional and international determinants of democracy. We distinguish between democratization and democratic survival and test the sensitivities of 67 proposed determinants by varying the contro...

This article presents a new, monthly updated dataset on organized violence—the Uppsala Conflict Data Program Candidate Events Dataset. It contains recent observations of candidate events, a majority of which are eventually included in the Uppsala Conflict Data Program Georeferenced Event Dataset as part of its annual update after a careful vetting...

We theorize that three distinct structures of democratic constraint explain why more democratic dyads do not engage in military conflict with each other. We build on earlier theories that focused on electoral and horizontal accountability. We add a new dimension—the social accountability provided by an active civil society. Using several new measur...

This article presents ViEWS-a political violence early-warning system that seeks to be maximally transparent, publicly available, and have uniform coverage, and sketches the methodological innovations required to achieve these objectives. ViEWS produces monthly forecasts at the country and subnational level for 36 months into the future and all thr...

Several studies show a beneficial effect of peacekeeping operations (PKOs). However, by looking at individual effect pathways (intensity, duration, recurrence, diffusion) in isolation, they underestimate the peacekeeping impact of PKOs. We propose a novel method of evaluating the combined impact across all pathways based on a statistical model of t...

Several studies show that internal armed conflict breeds conflict by exacerbating conditions that increase the chances of war breaking out again. Empirically, this ‘conflict trap’ works through four pathways: conflicts increase the likelihood of continuation, recurrence, escalation, and diffusion of conflict. Past empirical studies have underestima...

Prediction and forecasting have now fully reached peace and conflict research. We define forecasting as predictions about unrealized outcomes given model estimates from realized data, and predictions more generally as the assignment of probability distributions to realized or unrealized outcomes. Increasingly, scholars present within- and outof- sa...

Climate change and armed civil conflict are both linked to socioeconomic development, although conditions that facilitate peace may not necessarily facilitate mitigation and adaptation to climate change. While economic growth lowers the risk of conflict, it is generally associated with increased greenhouse gas emissions and costs of climate mitigat...

This forum policy brief summarizes workshop scenarios from the 2016 Stockholm Forum on Security & Development. The scenarios illustrate how the short-term geopolitical costs of taking action to meet global climate targets may surpass long-term benefits in different contexts.

This paper conducts the first analysis of the effect of armed conflict on progress in meeting the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals. We also examine the effect of conflict on economic growth. Conflict has clear detrimental effects on the reduction of poverty and hunger, on primary education, on the reduction of child mortality, and on ac...

This article presents an updated version of the Institutions and Elections Project (IAEP) dataset. The dataset comprises information on 107 de jure institutional provisions, and 16 variables related to electoral procedures and electoral events, for 170 countries in the period 1960–2012. The dataset is one of the most encompassing datasets on global...

A recent Climatic Change review article reports a remarkable convergence of scientific evidence for a link between climatic events and violent intergroup conflict, thus departing markedly from other contemporary assessments of the empirical literature. This commentary revisits the review in order to understand the discrepancy. We believe the origin...

This article is the first to statistically examine the reciprocal relationship between formal political institutions and political corruption. We argue that political corruption is an informal institution that allows nondemocratic leaders to build political support, act as a substitute for liberalizing concessions in the formal institutions of the...

The article reviews the literature on the relationship between democracy and armed conflict, internal as well as interstate. The review points to several similarities between how democratic institutions affect both conflict types. It summarizes the main empirical findings and discusses the most prominent explanations as well as the most important o...

Many conflict studies regard formal democratic institutions as states’ most important vehicle to reduce deprivation-motivated armed conflict against their governments. We argue that the wider concept of good governance—the extent to which policy making and implementation benefit the population at large—is better suited to analyze deprivation-based...

1 Conflict as development in reverse Civil conflicts are among the most devastating social phenomena in the modern world. They often have staggering death tolls – in Lebanon 1975–1990, for instance, about 145,000 out of the country's population of 2.8 million were killed in battle (Lacina and Gleditsch, 2005). On top of direct battle deaths come nu...

Hegre, Håvard et al. (2012) Predicting Armed Conflict, 2010–2050. International Studies Quarterly, doi: 10.1111/isqu.12007 © 2012 International Studies Association The article predicts changes in global and regional incidences of armed conflict for the 2010–2050 period. The predictions are based on a dynamic multinomial logit model estimation on a...

Warfare seems endemic to mankind. Nations around the world are riven by conflict. But is the impetus to war decreasing?Håvard Hegre finds statistical grounds for hope.

This paper conducts the first analysis of the effect of armed conflict on progress in meeting the United Nation's Millennium Development Goals. We also examine the effect of conflict on economic growth. Conflict has clear detrimental effects on the reduction of poverty and hunger, on primary education, on the reduction of child mortality, and on ac...

The paper outlines and compares two models of how globalization is likely to affect the risk of civil war - a liberal model and structuralist model. Overall, we find considerably more support for the lib- eral model than for the structuralist, anti-globalist model. Trade does appear to have a capacity for in- creasing internal peace - not directly,...

We simulate how a set of different UN policies for peace-keeping operations is likely to affect the global incidence of internal armed conflict. The simulation is based on a statistical model that estimates the efficacy of UN peacekeeping operations (PKOs) in preventing the onset, escalation, continuation, and recurrence of internal armed conflict....

Several studies indicate that internal armed conflict breeds conflict. Armed conflict creates conditions that increase the chances of war breaking out again. This 'conflict trap' works through several channels: Conflicts (1) polarize populations and create deep resentments and build up the organizational capacity for future warfare, (2) undermine d...

Executive Summary This paper reviews the literature on the development consequences of internal armed conflict and state fragility and analyzes the relationship using data from World Development Indicators, UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Data, and World Bank state fragility assessments. Our main focus is on a set of development indicators that capture se...

Two studies question whether economic interdependence promotes peace, arguing that previous research has not adequately considered the endogeneity of trade. Using simultaneous equations to capture the reciprocal effects, they report that trade does not reduce conflict, though conflict reduces trade. These results are puzzling on logical grounds. Tr...

This article presents ACLED, an Armed Conflict Location and Event Dataset. ACLED codes the actions of rebels, governments, and militias within unstable states, specifying the exact location and date of battle events, transfers of military control, headquarter establishment, civilian violence, and rioting. In the current version, the dataset covers...

This article examines the link between subnational poverty and the location of civil war events. Drawing on the ACLED dataset, which breaks internal conflicts down to individual events at the local level, we take a disaggregated approach to the study of conflict. Local-level socioeconomic data are taken from the Liberian Demographic and Health Surv...

The Lewis Fry Richardson Lifetime Achievement Award is a triennial prize to honour scholars, who have made exemplary contributions to the scientific study of militarised conflict. This essay presents the third winner of the award – Nils Petter Gleditsch – and commemorates on his scholarly achievements over the last four decades.

The gravity model of trade states that the volume of trade between two countries is proportional to the product of the sizes of the two countries and the inverse of the distance between them. The gravity model, however, was initially suggested for other types of social interactions, and it also predicts well the probability of militarized disputes....

In this chapter, we investigate the question of democratic civil peace- That is, democratic peace at the intrastate level. We use interchangeably the terms civil war and intrastate violence for events where organized violence is used for political goals, although conventionally the term war is often reserved for conflicts where the annual number of...

This article introduces the special issue on `The Aftermath of Civil War' and presents the research project from which the articles in this issue originate. The article presents a few empirical observations that demonstrate the increasing importance of the post-conflict situation for actors that engage to reduce the global incidence of armed confli...

Countries have better abilities and stronger incentives to engage in militarized conflicts the larger and more powerful they are. The article applies Zipf's notion of a ``gravity model'' to the risk of interstate conflict and argues that the empirical relationship between size and distance and conflict is stronger than any other identified in dyadi...

Esteban & Ray formalize the argument that conflict is likely to be more intense when individuals in a society are divided into two clearly identifiable groups where differences within groups are considerably smaller than differences between groups. They show that such polarization increases conflict, and they introduce a theoretical basis for its q...

Critics of trade liberalization argue that globalization increases countries’ vulnerability to economic shocks and hence may exacerbate domestic social conflict. Such social conflict may also be transformed into armed conflict. Others argue that globalization promotes economic growth and reduces poverty, which leads to a reduction in the risk of in...

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La version attachée est un rapport produit dans la série Copenhagen Consensus Conflicts Challenge Papers (2008),61p. oui

Why do larger countries have more armed conflict? This paper surveys three sets of hypotheses forwarded in the conflict literature regarding the relationship between the size and location of population groups: Hypotheses based on pure population mass, on distances, on population concentrations, and some residual state-level characteristics. The hyp...

This paper presents a multivariate multinomial logit model of changes to countries' level of democracy ('Markov regression'), taking into account the stability of di¤erent in-stitutional setups, average income, di¤usion through neighborhoods, and the instability of new and inconsistent institutions. To allow interpreting the aggregate e¤ect of thes...

Democracies rarely if ever fight one another, but they participate in wars as frequently as autocracies. They tend to win the wars in which they participate. Democracies frequently build large alliances in wartime, but not only with other democracies. From time to time democracies intervene militarily in ongoing conflicts. The democratic peace may...

This paper examines the link between absolute and relative poverty and the location of civil war events. Drawing on the ACLED dataset, which breaks internal conflicts down to individual events at the local level, this paper takes a disaggregated approach to the study of conflict. The conflict data are linked with geographically referenced socioecon...

This article examines how political institutional structures affect political instability. It classifies polities as autocracies or democracies based on three institutional dimensions: election of the executive, constraints on executive decision-making authority, and extent of political participation. It hypothesizes that strongly autocratic and de...

In the literature on civil war onset, several empirical results are not robust or replicable across studies. Studies use different definitions of civil war and analyze different time periods, so readers cannot easily determine if differences in empirical results are due to those factors or if most empirical results are just not robust. The authors...

Countries that share rivers have a higher risk of military disputes, even when controlling for a range of standard variables from studies of interstate conflict. A study incorporating the length of the land boundary showed that the shared river variable is not just a proxy for a higher degree of interaction opportunity. A weakness of earlier work i...

Gartzke and Li (2003b) formulate a mathematical relationship between “trade share,” “trade dependence,” and “trade openness,” and use this to argue that the disparity between the findings in studies by Barbieri and those of Oneal and Russett and others can partly be explained by features of variable construction. This article argues that although G...

This paper applies a methodology for organized specification tests to establish the robustness of empirical findings in the quantitative literature on civil war onset. A review of the literature reveals that several empirical results are not robust or not replicable across studies, which creates uncertainty about the validity of inferences drawn fr...

According to the liberal peace proposition, pairs of democratic states and pairs of states with extensive trade ties are more peaceful than other pairs of states, and democratic states are also more peaceful internally than other regime types. This article reviews the recent literature on the liberal peace, and proceeds to review the literature on...

A measure—trade efficiency—that models the extent to which individual economic entities within two countries trade with each other is used to investigate the claim that symmetrical dependence on trade between two states is required for the trade bond to reduce the probability of interstate conflict. This measure is better suited to study this quest...

An important key to reducing the suffering due to civil war is to shorten conflicts. The marked decrease in the incidence of conflicts in the 1990s was mostly due to a high number of conflict terminations, not to a decrease in the number of new wars. The articles in this special issue treat theoretically and empirically the determinants of civil wa...

this report is to alert the international community to the adverse consequences of civil war for development. These consequences are suffered mostly by civilians, often by children and by those in neighboring countries. Those who take the decisions to start or to sustain wars are often relatively immune to their adverse effects. The international c...

Over the past decade the liberal peace—the finding that democracy and economic interdependence contribute to peace among nations—has emerged as one of the strongest and most important results in the scientific study of international relations. Recent research indicates, however, that the pacific benefits of democracy and interdependence may not be...

war to be contingent on development: Poor democracies are unstable and hence should be less efficient as institutions for conflict resolution, democratic institutions may require more resources than autocratic ones to contain insurgencies, and increased development brings with it a pressure for constitutional changes in autocracies that may turn vi...

Samuel Huntington's (1991) thesis of democratic waves has come under strong criticism from scholars such as Renske Doorenspleet (2000) and Adam Przeworski and his colleagues (2000). We take issue with all of these authors' (including Huntington's) use of a blunt dichotomous measure of democracy, which we believe creates the potential for inaccurate...

"Civil war conflict is a core development issue. The existence of civil war can dramatically slow a country's development process, especially in low-income countries which are more vulnerable to civil war conflict. Conversely, development can impede civil war. When development succeeds, countries become safer―when development fails, they experience...

The paper explores the relationship between development, democracy and civil war. I review some contributions to the literature on the bilateral relationships between the three variables, and argue that we should expect the relationship between democracy and civil war to be contingent on the levels of income, literacy/education, and primary commodi...

The paper explores the relationship between development, democracy and civil war. I review some contributions to the literature on the bilateral relationships between the three variables, and argue that we should expect the relationship between democracy and civil war to be contingent on the levels of income, literacy/education, and primary commodi...

Dorussen (1999) concludes that trade between states reduces the incentives for conflict, but that the effect of trade diminishes with a larger number of countries. I demonstrate that the indicator Dorussen uses to gauge the impact of trade is dependent on the size of the system itself, and therefore may be an inappropriate means by which to evaluat...

Coherent democracies and harshly authoritarian states have few civil wars, and intermediate regimes are the most conflict-prone. Domestic violence also seems to be associated with political change, whether toward greater democracy or greater autocracy. Is the greater violence of intermediate regimes equivalent to the finding that states in politica...

“The previous war in the Middle East was about oil, the next war will be about water.” Such predictions have been made regularly, and particularly with reference to the possibility of upstream–downstream conflicts in major rivers which cross interstate boundaries. A good case can be made that competition over water resources may exacerbate conflict...

This article investigates the liberal idea that trade between two states reduces the likelihood of militarized conflict between them. Richard Rosecrance's argument that industrial-technological developments have made peaceful trading strategies more efficient today is examined in connection with the empirical literature on trade and conflict. Devel...

This article explores the evolutionary and endogenous relationship between democracy and war at the system level. Building on Kant, the authors argue that the rules and norms of behavior within and between democracies become more prevalent in international relations as the number of democracies in the system increases. The authors use Kalman filter...

This article introduces the Polity IIId ("d" is for dates) data set. The Polity IIId project codes the precise dates of changes in political structure identified by Polity III for all independent countries in the international system from 1800 to 1994. By moving from annual measurements of authority and polity characteristics, the Polity IIId data...

In this article, we re-examine the statistical evidence for the democratic peace at the dyadic level. We also investigate the seeming paradox that democracies are engaged in war as often as autocracies at the nation level. From the extensive literature on democracy and peace we have selected as our point of departure two influential contributions (...

Peace and regime type can be examined at the dyadic, nation, and system levels. At the dyadic level, it is well established that democracies rarely if ever fight each other. At the national level, the broad consensus is that there is no significant relationship between democracy and war participation, but this conclusion remains controversial. At t...

The paper argues that democratic institutions become more effective as conflict reducing mechanisms in the presence of elements of socio-economic development. An empirical analysis confirms that there is a strong interactive effect between development and democracy. Low-income democracies are at least as conflict-prone as low-income non-democracies...