Using novels to predict the future conflicts

@mljockers has a topic model of 3K 19th c. Anglophone novels. Why not run a time series analysis on the data to see if, for example, the Civil War is predicted by topic distribution. @oleg_sobchuk @acerbialberto @Ted_Underwood @scott_bot https://t.co/W68B7ZfLGf

— Bill Benzon, aka The Danish Space Laser (@bbenzon) June 27, 2021

Philip Oltermann, ‘At first I thought, this is crazy’: the real-life plan to use novels to predict the next war, The Guardian, 26 June 2021.

The name of the initiative was Project Cassandra: for the next two years, university researchers would use their expertise to help the German defence ministry predict the future.

The academics weren’t AI specialists, or scientists, or political analysts. Instead, the people the colonels had sought out in a stuffy top-floor room were a small team of literary scholars led by Jürgen Wertheimer, a professor of comparative literature with wild curls and a penchant for black roll-necks.

After the officers had left, the atmosphere among Wertheimer’s team remained tense. A greeting gift of camouflage-patterned running tops and military green nail varnish had helped break the ice, but there was outstanding cause for concern. “We’d been unsure about whether to go public over the project,” recalls Isabelle Holz, Wertheimer’s assistant. The university had declined the opportunity to be formally involved with the defence ministry, which is why the initiative was run through the Global Ethic Institute, a faculty-independent institution set up by the late dissident Catholic, Hans Küng. “We thought our offices might get paint-bombed or something.”

They needn’t have worried. “Cassandra reaches for her Walther PPK” ran the headline in the local press after the project was announced, a sarcastic reference to James Bond’s weapon of choice. The idea that literature could be used by the defence ministry to identify civil wars and humanitarian disasters ahead of time, wrote the Neckar-Chronik newspaper, was as charming as it was hopelessly naive. “You have to ask yourself why the military is financing something that is going to be of no value whatsoever.” Advertisement

In the end, the launch of Project Cassandra saw neither paint bombs nor sit-ins. The public, Holz says, “simply didn’t take us seriously. They just thought we were mad.”

Sensory talent, a literary seismograph:

But Wertheimer says great writers have a “sensory talent”. Literature, he reasons, has a tendency to channel social trends, moods and especially conflicts that politicians prefer to remain undiscussed until they break out into the open.

“Writers represent reality in such a way that their readers can instantly visualise a world and recognise themselves inside it. They operate on a plane that is both objective and subjective, creating inventories of the emotional interiors of individual lives throughout history.”

His favourite example of literature’s ability to identify a social mood and cast it into the future is a retelling of the Cassandra myth by the East German novelist Christa Wolf. Kassandra, published in 1983, casts Troy as a state not unlike the late-stage German Democratic Republic, succumbing to the paranoia of a Stasi-like secret police as it veers towards a not-so-cold war. Kassandra, cursed with the gift of prophecy, is also a cipher for the author’s own predicament: she foresees the decline her society is heading for, but her warnings are ignored by the military patriarchy.

If states could learn to read novels as a kind of literary seismograph, Wertheimer argues, they could perhaps identify which conflicts are on the verge of exploding into violence, and intervene to save maybe millions of lives.

Ask Watson:

Germany, which had contributed to the Afghan war in only a modest capacity and stayed out of Iraq, has invested some £43m into figuring out if it can use data tools to predict international conflicts. It has set aside a further £2.6bn to expand the approach until 2025. The centrepiece of its attempt at geopolitical clairvoyance is a megadata management platform developed at Munich’s University of the German Federal Armed Forces. It is called Preview – a forced acronym for “Prediction, Visualisation, Early Warning” – overseen by Carlo Masala, a professor of international politics. Preview sucks up information that could give a hint about where on the planet a crisis is about to erupt: RSS feeds of news websites, data banks tracking military conflicts, civil protests or car bombs going off. Broader structural clues are thrown into the mix: GDP per capita, regional educational structures, climate change data. Advertisement

All this raw information is fed into Watson, IBM’s artificial intelligence platform, which helps convert it into maps highlighting potential trouble spots: green indicates stability, orange highlights instability, red warns of a conflict on the verge of escalation. One German official says the AI prediction system had already given Angela Merkel’s government a few months’ warning of the rebel insurgency in Mozambique’s northern Cabo Delgado province, where security forces are battling with militants trying to set up an Islamic state. But the early warning system is still in development: the aim is to eventually be able to predict conflicts 12-18 months in advance.

Germany remains more wary than other nations of outsourcing strategic assessments to algorithms...

Literary infrastructure:

The group decided instead to focus on what it calls “literary infrastructure”: what happens around the text? How is it being received? “We became interested in what hit a nerve,” Rogge says. “Was a book heaped with awards and state prizes? Or was it banned and the author had to leave the country?” Kuwait, for example, saw a rise of novels about the situation of the stateless Bidoon minority after 2010. Many of them were censored or banned shortly after their publication, prefiguring the crackdown on Bidoon protesters in 2019.

Reading books in translation proved an inefficient way to pick up such trends. Rogge says he ended up skim-reading no more than 30 novels over the course of the project. Instead, Wertheimer’s team reached out to writers and literary critics in regions they were interested in. The response was surprisingly enthusiastic. The novelist Wole Soyinka sent links to articles in the Nigerian press and supplied contacts to other writers. Kosovar writer Beqë Cufaj organised a colloquium at his country’s embassy in Berlin. Hearings in Paris and Madrid were attended by novelists from Algeria, Morocco, Egypt, Israel and France, most of whom volunteered to pay for their attendance out of their own pockets.

In 2018, weeks after the Bundeswehr officers had travelled to Tübingen, Wertheimer presented his initial findings at the defence ministry in Berlin. He drew attention to a literary scandal around Jovan Radulović’s 1983 play Dove Hole, about an Ustashe massacre against their Serbian neighbours, and the expulsion of non-Serbian writers from the Serbian Writers’ Association in 1986. In the years that followed, he showed, there was an absence of tales about Albanian-Serbian friendships or love stories, and a rise in revisionist historical novels. Literature and literary institutions, he told the military men, had “paved the way for war” a good decade before the start of the bloodshed of the Kosovo war in 1998.

Carlo Masala was at the presentation. “At the beginning, I thought: this is crazy shit,” he recalls. “It won’t fly.” But Masala, who had spent a part of his academic career studying the conflict in Bosnia, remembered how the hardening tensions in the regions had been preceded by a decline in interfaith marriages. “In Kosovo, it seemed, you could detect similar early warning signs in the literary scene.”

They got funding for further research. They focused on Algeria:

The researchers developed a risk score system with nine indicators for each book: thematic reach, censorship of the text, censorship of the author, media response, scandals around the text, scandals around the author, literary awards for the author, literary awards for the the text, and narrative strategy. In each category, the book was assigned a score between –1 and +3: the higher the score, the more “dangerous” the text.

In some cases, negative scores were necessary. A book told from several perspectives, such as from two opposing enemy camps, was assigned zero or –1 points in the narrative strategy category. Zoltán Danyi’s 2015 novel The Carcass Remover, for example, scored only 12 points, mainly because it reflected on the Yugoslav wars without using black-and-white depictions of heroes or villains. “We realised that literature can also help solve or lessen conflicts,” Schlicht says. “Not every book divides opinion.”

Dystopian fiction from Algeria scored much higher. Body Writing by Mustapha Benfodil, a 2018 collage novel made up of the diaries and scribbles of a fictional astrophysicist killed in a mysterious car accident on the day of the presidential election, spoke of the desire to create order out of the chaotic memories of the Algerian civil war in the 90s, expressing a yearning for democratic change. Twenty points, the Project Cassandra researchers decided.

Had the book had more impact, it would have scored higher: La Faille by Mohamed-Chérif Lachichi, a 2018 thriller portraying violence in Algerian prisons, a corrupt legal system and a growing protest movement, scored 22 points because it represented a case of a well-known and widely reviewed author questioning the status quo. The highest-scoring work in the project’s 300-book data bank was Sansal’s 2084: Wertheimer’s team assigned it 25 points.

Bingo!

But the literary seismograph’s instincts proved reliable. In February 2019, two years after Wertheimer’s team had identified Algeria as a region of interest, civil protests broke out in Algiers and several other cities, culminating in the resignation of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. When Wertheimer handed over his team’s findings in the summer of 2020, they met the defence ministry’s formal requirements for taking their methodology to the next level. Project Cassandra had established a tangible link between literature and empirical historical events. Plus the cancellation of trips and seminars because of the pandemic meant the study had come in almost £34,000 under budget.

The project was defunded in the winter of 2020.