In Review: APL Fall Webinar Series
In November 2025, the Atrocity Prevention Lab (APL) hosted a three-part webinar series bringing together global leaders to tackle some of the toughest challenges in atrocity prevention—from shrinking resources to disappearing data and rapidly evolving technologies. Below is a summary of the key insights, lessons, and calls to action that emerged across the three conversations.
Webinar 1 – Expanding the Frontiers of Atrocity Prevention with Spatial Strategies
The first webinar in the series, hosted on November 5th, 2025, examined the application of geospatial analysis as an evidentiary tool to enforce legal mandates and operationalize atrocity prevention. Speakers emphasized the urgent need to bridge the gap between early warning and effective response by turning static maps into actionable mechanisms for legal accountability. The session moved beyond technical demonstrations to address how data can be refined to trigger decisive interventions in volatile regions like the Sahel and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Tammy Palacios–Senior Fellow at Middlebury Institute, Research Fellow at West Point, and CEO of Priority Sustainable Solutions LLC–opened the dialogue by focusing on the professionalization of prevention efforts. She stressed the importance of identifying specific data needs, ensuring that decision-makers receive the right information at the right time. Discussing a report on the Sahel, Tammy noted that while hundreds of local Civil Society Organizations were mapped in the region, they remained largely disconnected from major funding bodies like USAID. Her argument centered on the necessity of connecting these local actors with policymakers, suggesting that sustainable mapping solutions are essential to bridge the silos between grassroots realities and high-level strategy.
Ronald Serwanga of East Africa Law Society, International Bridges to Justice, Fountain Advocates, and Loyola University Chicago–shifted the focus to the legal application of these tools, proposing a synergistic model to integrate spatial technologies with international and domestic legal frameworks. Using the eastern DRC as a case study, he demonstrated that displacement is not random but geographically predictable, often correlating with mineral sites. Ronald argued that while robust mandates exist, such as the 2025 DRC Land Use Law, there is often a lack of objective triggers to enforce them. He posited that geospatial evidence serves as a critical evidentiary link, converting subjective community warnings into objective evidence that renders the crisis structural and actionable before UN bodies.
Addressing the operational realities of this work, Gillian Elliott–Project Coordinator at the Signal Program–discussed conflict early warning in an environment shaped by significant reductions in US support. She presented alarming data from a mixed-methods survey indicating that permanent funding cuts are threatening the survival of a majority of organizations managing conflict early warning systems in Sub-Saharan Africa. Gillian highlighted the human cost of this retrenchment, noting how years of hard-earned community trust are unraveling, citing the example of a health clinic built over eight years that collapsed when funding ceased. Her segment underscored the urgent need for solidarity and network strengthening as organizations are forced to reduce staff and services, cancel programs, and seek new donors.
The webinar concluded with a broad call for innovation amidst these resource constraints, emphasizing the imperative of maximizing impact with limited means. The discussion highlighted that in a landscape of diminishing funding, strategic networking and cost-effective tools are non-negotiable. Speakers highlighted the power of visual data to alert decision-makers, noting that it serves as a persuasive mechanism to drive advocacy. Ultimately, the session ended on a collaborative note, urging the community to engage in joint research and share resources to maintain the momentum of atrocity prevention work.
Webinar 2 – Knowledge Commons and Global Practices for Atrocity Prevention
The second webinar in the series, hosted on November 12th, 2025, highlighted critical threats to global atrocity prevention efforts posed by the loss of institutional knowledge and data. Experts across academia, fieldwork, and network mapping shared insights on how political shifts, funding changes, and staffing turnovers are eroding vital “knowledge commons” essential for early warning, risk assessment, and sustained prevention action.
The keynote speaker, Dr. Samantha Lakin–Genocide Studies Scholar and Senior Fellow at the Center for Peace, Democracy, and Development at UMass Boston–spoke on knowledge commons and global practices for atrocity prevention. She stressed the real-time disappearance of institutional memory through vanishing online repositories and departing experts, and advocated for collaborative, multi-institutional efforts to document and preserve knowledge as a form of resistance against these losses.
The next speaker, Peter Mwamachi–a leading early warning expert and experienced peace-building practitioner based in Kenya–emphasized practical challenges in Kenya, such as shifting government priorities and resource gaps. He urged embedding early warning systems within local and national frameworks to enhance resilience.
The final speaker, Nate Haken–Consultant and Senior Advisor to Fund For Peace–presented a decade-long social network mapping initiative across West Africa that visualizes the invisible infrastructure, trust networks, and collaborations fundamental to coordinated atrocity prevention. This network memory, if preserved, prevents fragmentation of prevention efforts and strengthens collective action.
While the knowledge preservation challenge is complex, the panelists agreed on clear ways forward:
- Non-cloud backups,
- Cross-sector collaboration,
- Institutional partnerships, and
- Building systems that outlive individual personalities.
The webinar concluded with a call for a global, collective commitment to safeguarding knowledge commons as public goods that underpin peace and security efforts worldwide.
Webinar 3 – Innovating at the Intersection of Technology and People
The third and final webinar in the series, hosted on November 19th, 2025, explored how tech and people can work together to strengthen conflict and atrocity prevention. Speakers stressed a simple but powerful point: tools like geospatial analysis, AI, and advanced models only work when grounded in human judgment and local expertise.
Keynote speaker Jessie Pechmann–Humanitarian GIS and Data Protection Lead at the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team–walked participants through wildly different estimates of buildings damaged in southern Lebanon and Gaza, depending on which dataset or method you look at. Automated building footprints and machine learning often missed or misclassified damage, while carefully edited OpenStreetMap data produced more complete and reliable baselines. Her examples from Lebanon, Gaza, and earthquake-affected Myanmar showed how local knowledge—like knowing which areas were bulldozed before an earthquake or what undamaged architecture actually looks like—is essential to interpreting satellite imagery and avoiding misleading “hard numbers.”
Dr. Roudabeh Kishi–Affiliate Faculty at the University of Denver and Founder & Director of Crisis Lens–focused on what it takes to make early warning models useful beyond the usual conflict hotspots. Drawing on her experience at ACLED, she noted that many AI models perform reasonably well where there’s lots of past violence to learn from, but they struggle in more stable contexts and with rarer forms of harm like gender-based violence. Her message: effective early warning needs new kinds of indicators—such as polarization, disinformation, and community reporting—backed by better data standards, ethical governance, interoperability, and much stronger data literacy so decision makers actually trust and use the outputs.
Food security expert Julien Jacob–of Action Against Hunger Spain–then shared a conflict and hunger platform developed with academic and private-sector partners. The tool combines environmental, economic, conflict, and food security data in some of the world’s most violence-affected countries to understand how specific types of attacks—on crops, markets, warehouses, or supply chains—translate into hunger. By restructuring open-source conflict data, scraping local media, using remote sensing, and training predictive models, the team is filling key data gaps in hard-to-reach areas. Julien emphasized that local teams and communities still play a crucial role in explaining what the data misses—like fear that keeps people from fields or markets—and in turning model insights into real-world decisions.
Across the webinar, the takeaway was clear: technology can dramatically expand what we can see, measure, and forecast, but it doesn’t replace human judgment, ethics, or local experience. Building better prevention means using AI and spatial tools responsibly, investing in data systems that can actually “talk” to each other, and keeping people—especially those closest to the risks—firmly in the loop from data collection to action.
Conclusion
Together, these three webinars underscored a shared message: atrocity prevention depends on more than powerful tools—it requires durable systems, trusted relationships, and a commitment to act before violence becomes inevitable. From spatial strategies that turn displacement patterns into legal triggers, to knowledge commons that safeguard institutional memory, to human-centered approaches to AI and early warning, the series highlighted how evidence, ethics, and local expertise must move in lockstep. The challenge ahead is to professionalize prevention work even in times of shrinking resources: connecting local actors to policymakers, preserving network memory across regions, and ensuring that early warning systems are not just technically sophisticated, but politically and socially grounded.
We invite you to turn these insights into concrete next steps. Strengthening atrocity prevention means investing in resilient data and knowledge infrastructures, building cross-sector partnerships that outlast individual champions, and centering communities and local experts in every phase—from data collection and analysis to decision-making and advocacy. Whether you are a practitioner, policymaker, researcher, or funder, we encourage you to share these webinars with your networks, integrate their lessons into your own practice, and join or form collaborative efforts that break down silos across sectors.
Recordings of all three sessions are available to watch on demand at the link below; we hope you will revisit them, use them in trainings and discussions, and continue expanding this community of practice dedicated to preventing atrocities before they occur.