This is the story of the Conflict Early Warning Systems (CEWS) project of the International Social Science Research Council. It relates the history of the project, presents its empirically grounded approach to anticipating violent conflict, and shows how the approach may be extended to other social science research arenas. Phase analysis of conflict life cycles, comparative case studies, reconstructed narratives, and policy lessons are hallmarks of this work by an international, interdisciplinary group of expert conflict analysts. The book projects alternate pathways to war and peace by a coding, graphing, and, and computational procedure that takes into account both contested conflict histories and future conflict resolutions.