Entry conditions
What has to be true before this outcome is plausible.
- Organized violence persists beyond episodic unrest.
- Nonviolent coalitions lose the ability to isolate violent factions or conflict becomes multi-sided.
- Security cohesion, political off-ramps, and ordinary criminal enforcement fail to contain escalation.
Institutional pathway
How the outcome develops at the system level.
- Violence becomes recurrent and geographically persistent.
- Political and security actors fragment, producing rival coercive capacities or chronic contested control.
- Economic, service, displacement, and humanitarian effects accumulate over time.
Termination conditions
What distinguishes an outcome from an unresolved phase.
- A negotiated political-security settlement, decisive restoration of a common lawful order, or exhaustion/fragmentation reduces sustained organized violence.
- The specific termination mechanism is highly case-dependent.
Economic & humanitarian consequences
What the corpus says to watch after the political label.
- This is the outcome with the largest plausible humanitarian, displacement, infrastructure-continuity, fiscal, and long-run economic costs in the corpus.
- Scenario casualty and duration ranges are planning envelopes, not forecasts.
Restoration / reconstruction
What ordinary governance has to recover.
- Prioritize civilian safety, lawful authority, essential services, humanitarian access, records, fiscal continuity, and institutional reconstruction.
- Do not treat emergency security arrangements as self-justifying permanent governance.
Common misreads
Do not collapse these into the outcome.
- Riots or sporadic political violence are not the same as sustained internal conflict.
- A large peaceful movement is not an armed conflict because a small violent fringe exists.
- Scenario numbers should not be converted into predictions.
Confidence
Evidence boundary.
Low on precise scale/duration; high that sustained violence plus institutional fracture is qualitatively different from mass protest or episodic unrest.
Current-sensitive legal, institutional, fiscal, election, and threat claims must be reverified before present-tense reliance.
