Abstract for: Work in Process: The SIGMA System for Projecting and Preventing Genocide

Genocide and mass atrocities are a serious problem worldwide, and have several impacts: • Directly through deaths and major injuries and • Destruction of people’s livelihoods and sense of security which, in turn, leads to-- • Massive dislocations of population who often end up in refugee camps where they suffer from contagious disease, malnutrition, and violence. • Damage to the infrastructure and economy with effects that can last many years. SIGMA is a system being developed by Bellwether International to project the potential for genocide in a particular country or region and evaluating various interventions for preventing genocide from occurring. SIGMA is an improvement over existing early warning systems because it identifies causal relationships underlying genocide and provides a framework for designing effective responses to impending genocides. It can be set up to represent the initial situations in a wide range of different countries Examples of the type of results the model will produce are shown in the abstract at an Overview level and for one of the modules. Results will be structured in a way that users can drill down to understand the results in greater depth for each scenario. Users will also be able to evaluate a large set of interventions for preventing genocide and examine comparative results to determine relative effectiveness. The early, conceptual stages of this project were reported on in a WIP presentation at ISDC 2025. We have made significant progress since then and now have a fully developed running model and basic interface. We are currently in the process of evaluating and improving the model with a group of genocide scholars and validating it against data from several historical cases. AI was used in the course of researching model variables