z-etzioni/African_Conflict_Visualization
Domain:
peace and securityRecord type:
software
Creator:
z-e
Host:
An interactive R Shiny application for exploring the distribution, duration, and types of armed conflict across African countries. Users can rotate and zoom the globe, hover over country markers for an overview of recorded conflicts, and select individual conflicts to view additional details.
# African Conflict Explorer
An interactive R Shiny application for exploring the distribution, duration, and types of armed conflict across African countries.
Users can rotate and zoom the globe, hover over country markers for an overview of recorded conflicts, and select individual conflicts to view additional details.
## Features
- Interactive Plotly globe centered on Africa
- One marker for each country represented in the conflict dataset
- Marker color indicates the country's most common conflict type
- Marker size indicates total unique conflict-year coverage
- Hover labels list the country's recorded conflicts
- Clickable table containing conflict-level information
- Detailed summary for each selected conflict
## Data
The application uses `african.csv`, which contains one observation per conflict and includes:
- Country
- Conflict name
- Conflict type
- Start and end years
- Duration
- Conflict summary
The summaries within the .csv were written by RA Zachary Etzioni for Doctor Melvin Ayogu using sources including, but not limited to, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), Reuters, BBC, The New York Times, The UN, The World Bank, and the IMF.
Country names were standardized to match the naming conventions used by the Natural Earth spatial dataset.
The only selection criteria for conflicts was a total casualty number greater than 25. While not exhaustive, the list aims to synthesize information from a host of conflicts to provide foundation for Doctor Ayogu's research project on energy economics and arms supply routes across the continent.
## Measuring Conflict-Year Coverage
Marker size represents the number of unique years covered by conflicts in a country.
Overlapping conflicts are not double-counted. For example, if one conflict lasted from 2000–2005 and another lasted from 2003–2007, the application treats the combined interval as 2000–2007.
The application measures elapsed time as:
`end year - start year`
rather than counting every calend …