What a conflict intelligence platform is, and what this one does
A conflict intelligence platform turns scattered public reporting about armed conflict into structured, comparable information: events with a type and a place, countries with a score and a trend, and the context to read them by. WarWatch is one: 45 news and OSINT sources become classified events on a globe, a severity ladder per country, sourced dossiers, custom alerts and a daily brief.
Three things the category has to do
The phrase covers a lot of products, so it is worth being concrete. A conflict intelligence platform has to do three things that a news feed and a map do not do on their own.
- Structure. Turn a report into an event with a type, a place, a time and a country, so events can be counted, compared and filtered.
- Rank. Say which countries and which events deserve attention now, and whether that is rising or falling.
- Contextualise. Attach the background that makes an event legible: who governs the country, what pressure it is under, what else is within reach.
WarWatch’s answer to each is described below, including the parts that are automated and the parts that are model-written, because a platform that does not say which is which cannot be trusted on either.
How WarWatch does it
- 01
Public signals
45 sources with credibility weights: wires, international and regional press, defence trade press, OSINT publishers, verified Telegram channels, geolocated incident feeds, GeoConfirmed's public feed. - 02
Structured events
Each item is matched to countries and classified by a keyword filter and then a model: bombardment, missile attack, aircraft downed, invasion, nuclear — or escalation, diplomatic, irrelevant. Only the first group raises a map alert. - 03
Map
Alerts are placed on a 3D globe with source and summary and expire after five hours. Countries are tinted on a four-band severity ladder from their count of conflict articles over 3 to 30 days. - 04
Country context
A dossier per country with sourced leadership, sanctions, IMF and World Bank figures, and a model-written debrief and eight-axis posture generated from those facts and recent reporting. - 05
Importance
An escalation trend per country computed daily; a daily written brief for the five most reported countries, built only from their last seven days of war articles. - 06
Monitoring
Seven kinds of custom alert rule, an email digest of critical alerts, a scheduled daily report, a watchlist dashboard and a public API over the same data.
How it differs from what you already use
| Criterion | News website | Basic conflict map | WarWatch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Organised by | Story and publication time | Event location | Event, country and time together |
| What it ranks | Editorial choice | Usually nothing — every pin is equal | Countries by conflict reporting; feed items by priority and source weight |
| Country background | In the story, if the writer included it | Rarely | A standing dossier with sourced figures per country |
| Change over time | Read the archive | Watch the map | Trend badges, daily briefs, alert rules on change |
| Sources | Its own reporting | Varies; often unattributed | 45 named sources, link kept on every item |
| Beyond the battlefield | Separate sections | Usually not | Corridors, supply-chain assets, military aircraft on public ADS-B, outbreak bulletins |
Fact, report, analysis — kept apart
Three kinds of statement appear on WarWatch and they are not interchangeable. A sourced fact has a publisher, a URL and a date, and is quoted from the publisher. A report is what a news or OSINT source said, kept with its link and its source’s credibility weight, and not confirmed by WarWatch. Analysis — the debriefs, briefs and posture axes — is model-written from the first two and labelled as such.
Limitations
- Coverage follows public reporting; an under-reported conflict scores lower than its intensity.
- Automated classification errs in both directions.
- Map positions carry the source’s precision, not a verified coordinate.
- Model-written text can be wrong in ways the sourced figures are not, which is why they are kept apart.
Plans and what each includes are on the pricing page; the data is available through the developer API.
Frequently asked questions
- What is the difference between a conflict map and a conflict intelligence platform?
- A conflict map visualises reported events geographically. A conflict intelligence platform also structures them — type, severity, country, time — and adds what is needed to interpret them: scores and trends per country, background on the state involved, alerts on change, and written summaries. WarWatch contains a conflict map; the rest of it is the intelligence layer.
- How does WarWatch monitor global conflicts?
- By reading 45 public news and OSINT sources continuously, matching each item to the countries it concerns, classifying whether it reports an armed-conflict event and of what type, raising high-severity items as timed map alerts, scoring each country on its volume of conflict reporting, and writing a daily brief for the five most reported countries.
- Is WarWatch a news site?
- It contains one — the intel feed and the searchable archive — but its purpose is different. A news site publishes stories; WarWatch organises other publishers' reporting by place, severity and country so patterns are visible that a list of headlines hides, and links back to the original on every item.
- Does WarWatch write its own analysis?
- Yes, and it labels it. Daily briefs and country debriefs are model-written from the platform's own reporting and sourced facts. Figures with a publisher are fetched from the publisher and overwritten onto the analysis so a number on screen is never the model's memory.
- Who is WarWatch for?
- Analysts, OSINT researchers, journalists, students, security professionals, investors and anyone following international affairs who wants the map, the sources and the context in one place. It is built on public information and is not a substitute for professional intelligence services.
Related resources
See the map
The live conflict map, the country dossiers and the intel feed are free to open. Premium adds critical alerts, the strait monitors, the supply-chain figures and the daily report by email.
WarWatch (war-watch.com) is a global conflict intelligence platform built on publicly available information: news wires, regional press, public OSINT feeds and open datasets. Conflict information changes quickly and early reports are often incomplete or later revised. Nothing on this site is a substitute for official security guidance, and no event shown here should be treated as independently confirmed unless a source says so.