Geopolitical analysis with open sources is a different exercise from conflict OSINT. The question is not where a strike landed but what a state is doing and under what pressure — so the useful tools are shipping and trade data, sanctions and leadership registers, economic series, satellite imagery of infrastructure, news indexing at scale, and platforms that join those to a live picture. This page lists them by the question each answers and explains where WarWatch fits.
| Criterion | Question | Tools | Caveat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who governs, who is sanctioned | Wikipedia current-leaders list, Wikidata, OFAC / EU / UN / OFSI registers | World-editable sources need cross-checking; programme names can mislead | |
| How stressed is the economy | IMF WEO, World Bank indicators | Projections sit beside measured years; some series stop early | |
| What moves, and through where | AIS trackers, UN Comtrade, WarWatch corridor monitors | AIS can be off; trade data lags and has gaps | |
| What is being built or used | Copernicus Sentinel, commercial imagery, Google Earth | Structures, not intentions; resolution limits | |
| What the world's press is saying | GDELT | Attention, not occurrence | |
| What markets expect | Prediction markets (e.g. Polymarket) | A price is a crowd's bet, not a forecast | |
| The live picture, joined up | WarWatch | Reporting-based; classification automated |
Who holds each office now (the list page, edited within hours of a handover) and since when (Wikidata's dated statements).
OFAC's SDN list, the EU sanctions map, the UN consolidated list and the UK OFSI list: which persons, entities and programmes are designated.
Macro and structural series for nearly every country, with free APIs.
Reported bilateral trade by commodity code, from national customs returns.
Vessel positions from AIS broadcasts; commercial services add identity, destination and history.
Free optical and radar imagery, revisited every few days, for watching infrastructure: ports, bases, plants, storage.
Global news machine-coded for events, actors, places and tone, at scale.
Real-money markets on geopolitical outcomes; the price aggregates what participants expect. WarWatch surfaces conflict-related markets on its predictions page.
Joins the registers above to a live picture: a dossier per country with leadership, sanctions, IMF and World Bank figures fetched from source; eighteen strait monitors on AIS transit counts; commodity exposure from published production shares; 1,419 supply-chain assets and their operators; a live map of conflict reporting; and alert rules, including one that fires when a register records a new head of state, head of government or sanctions regime.
A change in a register is a fact; a change on the map is a report; a change in a strait’s traffic is a signal. Geopolitical analysis is the work of putting the three together and saying which is which. The registers give you the state as it is on paper, the shipping and imagery give you the state as it behaves, and the monitor gives you the state as it is being reported — and the discrepancies between them are usually where the analysis is.
As the join. WarWatch does not replace the registers — it fetches from them, stores the URL and date, and overwrites its own model-written figures with theirs. It does not replace the shipping trackers — it counts transits through eighteen corridors and shows the components of each day’s score. What it adds is the single screen and the rule that tells you when any of it changes.
For the event-verification side of OSINT see best OSINT tools for conflict monitoring.
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.