Remembering Richard Holbrooke has also meant remembering the Dayton Peace Accords, or trying to. What happened, why did it work, and what was the upshot of all those Balkan conflicts? Wars are never so simple, or so quickly done with.

It was the Dayton period that inspired my patented Top Three Signs a Conflict Is Spinning Out of Control. Now, this is not what one would call scientific, and will be less useful (maybe useless) for diplomats or academics who study these things. But there are a few points that, when they come up in the coverage from some foreign place, should cause a person watching or reading the news to worry. Since we have been running our year-end lists on the site this week, I’ll offer it here:

Any reference to the nth holiest site of x religion, where n > 2. Anything that happened before 1649 mattering. In order to understand it, Americans have to learn not only the names of foreign cities, but the names of neighborhoods within them.

This checklist served pretty well in Iraq (al-Askari mosque; a murder in 661; Sadr City), though it’s not infallible, and there are variants. Sometimes the worst fighting is not in an urban area, or religion is not the main dividing point. But, very roughly, the higher n is, the earlier the date, and the smaller the neighborhood—it’s a particularly bad sign if reporters start describing intersections—the worse off everyone is. Bonus crisis points if the neighborhood you have to learn about is in a city that isn’t even the capital.

Any suggestions for revisions, qualifications, or further examples?