By
Heidi Burgess

Updated May, 2023

Conflict Assessment and Early Warning Tools

Before political violence or war breaks out, there are usually many indicators that stresses are building. A variety of tools are available for assessing such stresses and the likelihood of future violence.

• Indicators of Violence Potential:
  • Preventive Diplomacy and International Violence Prevention - Provides an overview of many standard early warning indicators.
• Early Warning Indices: A variety of organizations and projects track such indicators and publish indices of violence potential. Among these are:
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  • The Fragile States Index
  • Before, a partership between Swisspeace and the Alliance for Peacebuilding.
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• How early warning is done:
  • Early Warning
  • Anticipating the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: An Early Warning Approach to Conflict and Instability
  • The Governance and Social Development Resource Center has an extensive online guide to preventing and mitigating violent conflict.
    • Chapter 1: Understanding Violent Conflict
    • Chapter 3: Preventing and Managing Violent Conflict have particularly useful materials relevent to violence prevention and limitation including sections on early warning and conflict assessment.
• Conflict Assessment Tools:
  In addition to looking for warning of impending violence, broader conflict assessment tools can be used to understand the nature of brewing conflicts, including who the parties are, what the issues are, and what the intervention possibilities are. Conflict assessment is an essential first step in any conflict mitigation or violence prevention strategy. In the early 2000s, the Conflict Information Consortium commissioned one of our members to collect and assess the major conflict assessment tools which were available at the time. To our (and his) surprise, he found several hundred, almost all slightly different. A good overview of approaches is illustrated in the tools listed below.
  • CAST: The Fund for Peace's Conflict Assessment System Tool. This tool uses a a methodology developed by the Fund for Peace for assessing the vulnerability of states to collapse. It measures this vulnerability in pre-conflict, active conflict and post-conflict situations. The methodology uses both qualitative and quantitative indicators, relies on public source data, and produces quantifiable results. It has diverse applications for governments, international organizations, private corporations, humanitarian organizations, the military, academic scholars and the media.
  • United States' Institute for Peace's Introduction to Conflict Analysis. Note: This course is no longer active, but remains a resource for peacebuilders worldwide.
  • A paper on the state of practice of conflict assessment from  the Consensus Building Institute.
  • Interagency Conflict Assessment Framework developed by the Interagency Working Group, formed under the auspices of the Reconstruction and Stabilization Policy Coordinating Committee (R&S PCC) of the U.S. Government.

If the early warning or conflict assessment suggests that violence is likely or imminent, a variety of steps can be taken to try to prevent that violence from occurring. See the section on violence prevention steps to learn more.