Conflict Lookouts

7. Massively Parallel Roles & Tasks

Conflict Lookouts alert society to dangers (especially, conflict-related dangers) that they believe society needs to urgently address. In many cases, they also highlight steps that they believe society needs to take to limit those dangers. Examples include organizations that are engaged in what has been called "early warning," such as The Fund for Peace, which has long maintained the "Fragile States Index," and the Trust Network that has an early warning/early response project focused on U.S. political violence that Madhawa Palihapitiya described in BI's interview with him.

We now have five principal subcategories of conflict lookouts: conflict early warners, discrimination watchdogs, governmental watchdogs, geopolitical threat monitors, and "canaries." These lookouts tend to look at a single problem from a single perspective. They seldom focus on the complex trade-offs that are required to balance efforts to deal with their problem with efforts to deal with problems that other lookouts find equally or even more serious. The complexifiers help do that. 

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