HAC2 Monitoring Patterns of Violence

Knowing  whether humanitarian action is effective requires feedback loops. Until now,  these are predominantly of qualitative nature. The International Committee of  the Red Cross (ICRC) currently relies on observations, interviews and status  reports compiled by field analysts to monitor its work. This has several  shortcomings: (1) status reports are heavily dependent on personal assessment  and thus fluctuate between different analysts; (2) the reports are in  unstructured, textual form making it difficult to extract information; (3)  although a large organization, the ICRC does not have the human resources to  monitor incidents of armed violence across entire countries. To address these  issues, we propose incorporating large amounts of data, quantitative measures  of conflict intensity and automated, machine-based event analysis. Such data  can be matched against the ICRC’s data on its protection work that aims to  influence armed forces and groups to fight in accordance with international  humanitarian law (IHL). This would allow the ICRC to monitor the impact of  its actions and facilitate more informed, data-driven decision-making in  planning future actions.

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_{Credits Main Image: ICRC./ Khalid Hawre / 02.06.2018/ Mosul}