The War Maps Project is an open, reproducible interface to publicly available evidence about organized armed conflict from 1946 to the present source boundary. It exists to help people understand conflicts they encounter in the news or in their own lives, without providing strategic advantage to any party.
Origins and purpose
The project makes visible relationships that isolated records and daily reporting can conceal: who is present, where observations occur, how participation changes over time, and where the human costs sit within wider living conditions. Its hope is straightforward: clearer public understanding can make avoidable conflict harder to sustain and its human cost harder to disregard.
War Maps is apolitical in purpose. It does not collect conflict observations, conduct surveillance, advise combatants, rank the legitimacy of parties, or infer legal responsibility from visual position. It combines records maintained by named public and institutional sources, then exposes the joins, transformations, coverage, and uncertainty behind every view.
The project originates in the causal framework developed in Causality and Attraction, Volume I and Nested Causal Modelling. War Maps applies nested causal modelling to the documented structure surrounding armed conflict. It is intended to develop into navigable nested causal models of every organized conflict for which peer-reviewed or institutionally maintained data are available.
Principal Investigator
Sid J.A. Hubbard is the Principal Investigator of the War Maps Project. At this stage, the entirety of the atlas is written, directed, and engineered by its Principal Investigator with the assistance of AI and data-science tools. Decisions about scope, interpretation, publication, and corrections remain with the Principal Investigator.
Open source and citation
War Maps software and original project documentation are published under the MIT License. Upstream datasets retain their own licenses and citation requirements. Books and other authored publications linked above are not relicensed by the repository license.
War Maps Project. (2026). War Maps: An Atlas of Organized Armed Conflict [Data set, software, and interactive atlas]. Sid J.A. Hubbard, Principal Investigator. https://github.com/SJAH9/war-maps-project