ANALYTICAL ESSAYS: EVALUATION, SYNTHESIS, REFLECTIONS Learning from the Past and Stepping into the Future: Toward a New Generation of

Developing political forecasting models not only increases the ability of political scientists to inform public policy decisions, but is also relevant for scientific advancement. This article argues for and demonstrates the utility of creating forecasting models for predicting political conflicts in a diverse range of country settings. Apart from the benefit of making actual predictions, we argue that predictive heuristics are one gold stan-dard of model development in the field of conflict studies. As such, they shed light on an array of important components of the political science literature on conflict dynamics. We develop and present conflict predic-tions that have been highly accurate for past and subsequent events, exhibiting few false-negative and false-positive categorizations. Our pre-dictions are made at the monthly level for 6-month periods into the future, taking into account the social–spatial context of each individual country. The model has a high degree of accuracy in reproducing his-torical data measured monthly over the past 10 years and has approxi