Conflict & War Library
Explore how wars began, what sustained them, who was involved, and how civilians and political settlements were affected.
Library edition: 25 October 2026. Narrative cutoffs and original source periods are separate from the edition date.Find it in Watchtower
Open Advanced / Investigate → Geopolitical Futures → Conflicts & wars. The library is also linked from Conflict history and Scenario tabletop.
- Choose Detailed dossiers, State-based source conflicts or Non-state source actor pairs.
- Search names, actors, causes, resources or beliefs. Combine this with country, region, period and theme filters, then select Search library.
- Open a profile to read all its sections and sources. Section buttons move directly to causes, resources, religion, civilian impacts or peace efforts.
- Use Export all matches for every filtered result, including later pages. Exporting an open profile retains its full text, references and any original source rows.
- Use the country research buttons for the existing country dossier and separately dated recent political reporting.
Full screen uses the existing Watchtower workspace expansion. The library's own country and historical-year filters are independent of the future resource-scenario year.
What the three collections contain
| Collection | Edition coverage | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Detailed editorial dossiers | 146 entries; earliest beginning 499 BCE | 112 conventionally bounded historical profiles and 34 dated recent backgrounds. Some are multiwar surveys or non-war disputes. |
| State-based source conflicts | 303 UCDP identities; 2,816 retained conflict-year rows, 1946–2025 | A source-defined conflict includes a state party and satisfies UCDP's definitions. One identity can have multiple episodes and changing opponents. |
| Non-state source actor pairs | 1,001 identities; 1,821 retained actor-pair-year rows, 1989–2025 | Neither opposing party is a state government under this source definition. These are not 1,001 interstate wars. |
The three counts must not be added into a total of unique wars. Dossiers overlap source identities and each other. The catalogue groups every row returned by the retained source tables at capture, not every conflict in world history.
The original annual-source interface remains under Conflict history, including dyads, termination, onset and within-border country-years, plus actor-stated issues, peace agreements and external support. Those datasets have their own time ranges and units.
Ten lenses in every dossier
- Actors: major governments, armed organizations and affected communities.
- Underlying causes: political, institutional, territorial and social context.
- Trigger: immediate events that escalated a longer dispute.
- Resources: land, water, oil, minerals, trade and financing where relevant.
- Religion, ideology and identity: documented roles, internal diversity and cases where religion was not central.
- Outside involvement: intervention, support, alliances and mediation.
- Civilian consequences: displacement, hunger, repression and other harms.
- Outcome and peace: treaties, ceasefires, transitions and unresolved issues.
- Timeline: selected dated milestones rather than every engagement.
- Limits: disputed explanations, changing period definitions and facts requiring current verification.
Read dates and explanations carefully
Recent editorial backgrounds stop at their displayed year, at latest 2024. An editorial date in 2026 or a successful reference-link check does not make a narrative a live situation report. The annual UCDP source catalogue separately extends through 2025. Use recent reporting for later developments and check its publication dates and source qualifications.
Negative search years mean BCE; there is no year zero. Dossier date filters use interval overlap. Source-catalogue filters use actual listed qualifying years, so a gap between first and last years is not silently filled. First and last recorded years do not establish continuous warfare or the exact start and end of a war.
Resource presence, war finance, strategic exposure and original causes are different concepts. Religious or ethnic affiliation does not establish a person's motives, armed-group membership or responsibility. An actor's claimed justification is not automatically a verified cause, legal entitlement or fact.
The source catalogue exposes coded incompatibilities and original records. Where a source table does not contain narrative motives, religion or resource explanations, those fields remain explicitly unestablished. Side A and Side B do not identify who attacked first. These editorial additions do not change the historical projection model or assign new war probabilities.
Sources and attribution
Dossiers are Watchtower-authored historical syntheses linked to secondary overviews and their bibliographies, with additional specialist and institutional references where supplied. They are not quotations or claims of independent primary-source verification of every causal interpretation. Bibliographic checks establish link reachability, not factual certification or current narrative status.
The source catalogue derives from Watchtower's retained UCDP / PRIO 26.1 annual datasets, under CC BY 4.0. Original normalized rows, source identifiers, classifications, date precision and unknown fields remain available. Full source citations appear in the library coverage disclosure and exports.
Core references: Davies, Pettersson and Öberg, Organized violence 1989–2025, and violent political protests (2026); Gleditsch et al., Armed Conflict 1946–2001: A New Dataset (2002); Sundberg, Eck and Kreutz, Introducing the UCDP Non-State Conflict Dataset (2012). Consult the linked codebooks for inclusion thresholds and definitions.
Countries are geographic research links, not a substitution of modern states for historical polities or a ruling on disputed sovereignty. A missing dossier or source record does not establish an absence of violence. Original Geopolitical Futures methods.