How to use this map

What you are looking at

This is a conflict monitor. Its unit is a theater — a conflict, with the states and armed groups inside it — and not a country. The lit zones are theaters: one can cover several states, stop short of all of them, and a country caught in two theaters glows for both. The glow is never a statement about a government.

From far away the map orients you. Up close it tells you what happened.

Getting into a conflict

Three ways in, and they all reach the same place.

• The conflict list. Every theater the map is drawing, in one place, in the order the map ranks them. On a computer or a tablet it is the Active conflicts menu in the top row; on a phone it is the bar along the bottom edge.
• The cards on the map. Where there is room, a theater carries a card with its tension level and its trend. On a phone the same reading is a single line.
• The lit area itself. Click or tap the glow. A theater that has been quiet may have no card of its own; its glow still answers, and the chip it reveals offers Show on map.

Selecting a theater frames it in the camera. Everything below becomes available at that point.

The theater panel

One instrument appears, holding the theater’s name, its tension level and its trend, the period in force, the clock, and three controls.

• Theater events — what the desk has published within the period you have chosen, plus conditions that still hold.
• Intelligence Report— the desk’s written snapshot of the conflict.
• Theater probability — an estimate for a stated question, priced by a prediction market, where one is running.

A control with nothing to offer says so and stays where it is. No probability for this theater is the data speaking; Not enough room is the window speaking, and closing something else brings it back.

Reading the marks

Zoom in and the events themselves appear. Each mark is drawn to say, spatially, what happened — there is no generic pin — and it carries several readings at once: what kind of event it was, how precisely the claim is made, how precisely the place is known, how important it is and how recent.

All of that is written down in the map key, behind the key control on the map. That document is the legend, and it is the only place those readings are defined.

Opening an event

Click or tap a mark, or a row in the theater events list. The event opens with its summary, its sources, its verification status and whatever media the desk published with it.

Every event has an address of its own, and Share copies it. One kind of mark takes two gestures rather than one: a national development pins its card on the first click and opens on the second.

Moving through time

• The period — 24 hours, 7 days or 30 days. It sets which events are drawn and listed, and it also chooses which Intelligence Report you read: a theater has up to three, one per window, written to different shapes. Where a window has no report the control says so, rather than handing you the nearest one.
• Standing conditions ignore the period. A closure that began in March is still true today, so it stays in the list whichever window you pick.
• The timeline along the bottom edge. Drag across it, or use the arrow keys, to browse by time. Its curve measures publishing activity — how much was written about this theater, weighted by importance. It is not a tension reading: a peak means a busy desk, not a worse day.

Settings that change what you see

• Map detail level — Novice, Explorer or Analyst. This one is a filter on the map itself: Novice draws the headline marks and leaves the rest off it entirely. If a theater looks emptier than you expected, check this first.
• Event clock — every time either in your own time zone or in UTC.
• Theme — dark or light.
• Language — English or Spanish, from the top right of the world view. It steps aside once a theater is selected.
• An account is optional, and it opens nothing. A reader who never signs in sees the same map, with the same events and the same detail levels.

What this map claims, and what it does not

Events are published one at a time by the editorial desk, each carrying the sources it was published on. Verification status travels with an event everywhere it appears: a disputed claim stays disputed here.

Where the events come from, and the legend for every mark, is in the map key. It reads that statement off the catalogue rather than declaring it, so what it says is true of the map you are looking at.