⚔️ Conflict & War

Background: why this matters

War is the oldest human-made catastrophe, and it rarely stays contained. Beyond the direct killing, armed conflict drives people from their homes, wrecks farms and power grids, spreads disease, and pushes economies into crisis far from the front line. For humanity as a whole, the scenario that matters most is a war between major powers, because that is the path by which conventional fighting can escalate to the use of nuclear weapons (see the Nuclear page).

The 20th century showed the scale of the danger: two world wars killed tens of millions of people, and the Second World War ended with the only wartime use of nuclear weapons. After 1945, direct wars between great powers became rare, a period historians sometimes call the 'Long Peace'. Wars did not disappear, though. Civil wars, insurgencies and proxy conflicts carried on, often with outside powers backing different sides.

Recent years have been among the most violent in decades. The Uppsala Conflict Data Program, which has tracked armed conflicts since 1946, has recorded the number of active state-based conflicts at or near the highest in its records. Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 brought large-scale interstate war back to Europe. The Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 and the war in Gaza that followed pulled in actors across the Middle East. Sudan's civil war, which began in April 2023, has created one of the world's largest displacement and hunger crises. According to UNHCR, more than 100 million people worldwide are now forcibly displaced.

This factor doesn't count deaths, which are slow and hard to verify in real time. Instead it uses the GDELT Project, which machine-reads news from around the world every 15 minutes and codes each reported event (a meeting, a protest, an airstrike) using the CAMEO scheme. We measure what share of all reported events are violent (assaults, fighting, mass violence), weighted by how many times each event is mentioned. It's a measure of how much violence the world's media is reporting, which tracks real violence closely but not perfectly: a quiet war can be under-reported, and a single shocking attack can dominate coverage for days.

What analysts watch: whether fighting spreads across borders or pulls in nuclear-armed states; flashpoints such as the Taiwan Strait, the Korean peninsula, India and Pakistan, and NATO's eastern flank; attacks on critical infrastructure and shipping; and whether ceasefires and negotiations are holding. Groups such as ACLED and the International Crisis Group publish detailed conflict monitoring alongside UCDP.