Violent internal conflict is the most important obstacle to economic progress in developing countries. The World Bank is collaborating with the UN Development Program and scholars around the world to develop the evidence base necessary to decide the best approach to help societies prevent conflict. Professor David Cingranelli is contributing to that effort. He argues that one important reason why conflict occurs in developing societies is that their governments often engage in practices such as torture and political imprisonment and discrimination against women. Those practices violate internationally recognized human rights. Human rights violations create grievances among citizens, and those grievances can lead to the onset and escalation of violent protest, acts of terrorism and even civil war. He believes that human rights metrics can be used to help forecast and prevent violent internal conflict around the world, including in the Caucasus countries. David Cingranelli is Professor of Political Science at Binghamton University, SUNY. He has written widely on human rights, democracy, and governance. His 2007 book with Rodwan Abouharb, Human Rights and Structural Adjustment (Cambridge University Press), demonstrated the negative human rights impacts of World Bank and IMF program lending in developing countries. He is a former President of the Human Rights Section of the American Political Science Association. Until 2012, he served as the co-director of the Cingranelli and Richards (CIRI) Human Rights Data Project, the largest and most widely used human rights data set in the world. Presently, he and his colleagues are working in collaboration with the United States Political Instability Task Force on a successor to the CIRI project, which will be called the “RIGHTS” data project. He was recently appointed to serve as the Founding Director of the Binghamton University Human Rights Institute. Open to the public, No admission fee Reception after the lecture, Room GSU 310