This article provides a structured description of openly available news topics and forecasts for armed conflict at the national and grid cell level starting January 2010. The news topics as well as the forecasts are updated monthly at conflictforecast.org and provide coverage for more than 170 countries and about 65,000 grid cells of size 55x55km worldwide.

This article proposes a new method for predicting escalations and de‐escalations of violence using a model which relies on conflict history and text features. The text features are generated from over 3.5 million newspaper articles using a so‐called topic‐model. We show that the combined model relies to a large extent on conflict dynamics, but that text is able to contribute meaningfully to the prediction of rare outbreaks of violence in previously peaceful countries. Given the very powerful dynamics of the conflict trap these cases are particularly important for prevention efforts.