Friday 7 June 2013

World War Map

I always wanted to make an animation of all the conflicts on earth to show how many wars and violences there are in recent history.
I made several researches trying to find the data to make a graphic representation of all these stupid wars that happened year after year leaving the world as we know it now (it means not a "better world" at all...)

Today I discovered a very nice web page, is the conflict encyclopaedia of the Uppsala Conflict Data Program.

with the maps inside this page I can, at least, give you an idea of what I have in my mind and that, maybe, I will never be able to finish....




This animated gif is not exactly what I intended to do, first of all, here represented there are just the official war conflicts between countries and this is just a small part of the conflict on earth.
(the conflict encyclopaedia indeed divides the conflict in three categories: Wars, Non-State Conflicts and One Side Violences, but these last two categories are available just for the most recent years).
I mean, it would be interesting to show the real conflicts, official and unofficial ones, maybe showing different colours for different typologies of wars, guerrillas, etc...
second, it has a relative importance to show USA in war when the conflict affects mostly Irak, Afghanistan or Vietnam. A better map should give more importance to those places where there was violences, and not just the official line-up of the countries (even if this is also very important...)
third, a real good map should show the regions where the wars take place, not the just the country. when you see Russia as a big red spot, but the war is concentrated just in Cecenia, this is a distortion of reality that can give a wrong idea of the dimension of the conflict.
fourth, the ideal map should show how many death were provoked here and there, maybe by mean of circles of different dimension, cause if you see a small spot on the map you tend to think it's a minor conflict, but this is not that proportional.

In my opinion an ideal map of world wars would take in consideration the most part of historical periods till it were possible to achieve reliable data about the conflicts.

Another map that I'm thinking and working to do is the map of all US conflicts with all the victims made by the States (maybe with a counter of the total number of victims year by year) in order to give an idea of the impact of the US foreign policies in terms of human lives.


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