Predicting Peace

I have long struggled with predicting when peace will occur. Actually, I’m struggling with predicting anything relating to war, but let’s focus on when peace arrives for now. There are two such questions in the current ACX 2026 competition: Will there be a cease-fire in Ukraine in 2026? Will there be a cease-fire in Sudan in 2026? When I entered my forecast for these questions, I did it based on Laplace’s rule of succession, i.e. as a function of their duration only. This is sort of justified if war durations are heavy-tailed, which would mean that the longer they go on for, the less likely it is that peace comes soon. But I don’t know if that is true. (Continue reading the full article on the web.)