Our World
in Data
Data

Number of countries where armed conflicts took place

See all data and research on:
War & Peace

What you should know about this indicator

An armed conflict is a disagreement between organized groups, or between one organized group and civilians, that causes at least 25 deaths during a year. This includes combatant and civilian deaths due to fighting.

Number of countries where armed conflicts took place
Included are armed conflicts that caused at least one death in the country that year.
Source
Uppsala Conflict Data Program (2024); Natural Earth (2022) – processed by Our World in Data
Last updated
August 26, 2024
Date range
1989–2023
Unit
countries

Related research and writing

Featured image for how researchers measure how common and deadly conflicts are. Stylized stacked bar chart, maps, and line chart indicating the frequency and deadliness of conflicts.

How different measures capture how common and deadly conflicts are, and when to use which one

Bastian Herre

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

This dataset is UCDP's most disaggregated dataset, covering individual events of organized violence (phenomena of lethal violence occurring at a given time and place). These events are sufficiently fine-grained to be geo-coded down to the level of individual villages, with temporal durations disaggregated to single, individual days.

You can find more notes at https://ucdp.uu.se/downloads/ged/ged241.pdf

Retrieved on
August 26, 2024
Retrieved from
https://ucdp.uu.se/downloads/index.html#ged_global
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Davies, Shawn, Garoun Engström, Therese Pettersson & Magnus Öberg (2024). Organized violence 1989-2023, and the prevalence of organized crime groups. Journal of Peace Research 61(4).
Sundberg, Ralph, and Erik Melander, 2013, “Introducing the UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset”, Journal of Peace Research, vol.50, no.4, 523-532

There are 258 countries in the world. Greenland as separate from Denmark. Most users will want this file instead of sovereign states, though some users will want map units instead when distinguishing overseas regions of France.

Natural Earth shows de facto boundaries by default according to who controls the territory, versus de jure. Optional point-of-view (POV) variants are available for several dozen countries in the next section.

Countries distinguish between metropolitan (homeland) and independent and semi-independent portions of sovereign states. If you want to see the dependent overseas regions broken out (like in ISO codes, see France for example), use map units instead.

Each country is coded with a world region that roughly follows the United Nations setup.

Countries are coded with standard ISO and FIPS codes. French INSEE codes are also included.

Includes some thematic data from the United Nations, U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, and elsewhere.

This is the most detailed. Suitable for making zoomed-in maps of countries and regions. Show the world on a large wall poster:

1:10,000,000 1″ = 158 miles 1 cm = 100 km

All users of Natural Earth are highly encouraged to read about data sources and manipulation in the Data Creation section.

Retrieved on
November 28, 2023
Retrieved from
https://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/10m-cultural-vectors/10m-admin-0-countries/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Natural Earth. Free vector and raster map data @ naturalearthdata.com

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline
Notes on our processing step for this indicator

UCDP provides geographical coordinates of each conflict event. We have mapped these coordinates to countries by means of the Natural Earth dataset.

In some instances, the event's coordinates fall within the borders of a country. Other times, the event's coordinates fall outside the borders of a country. In the latter case, we have mapped the event to the country that is closest to the event's coordinates.

Conflict event with id "53238" and relid "PAK-2003-1-345-88" was assigned to "Siachen Glacier" by Natural Earth. We have mapped it to "Pakistan" following the text in the where_description field from the Natural Earth data, which refers to "Giang sector in Siachen, Pakistani Kashmir".

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Number of countries where armed conflicts took place”, part of the following publication: Bastian Herre, Lucas Rodés-Guirao and Max Roser (2024) - “War and Peace”. Data adapted from Uppsala Conflict Data Program, Natural Earth. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-countries-where-armed-conflicts-took-place [online resource]
How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Uppsala Conflict Data Program (2024); Natural Earth (2022) – processed by Our World in Data

Full citation

Uppsala Conflict Data Program (2024); Natural Earth (2022) – processed by Our World in Data. “Number of countries where armed conflicts took place” [dataset]. Uppsala Conflict Data Program, “Georeferenced Event Dataset v24.1”; Natural Earth, “Natural Earth - Large scale data (1:10m Cultural Vectors) 5.1.1” [original data]. Retrieved November 21, 2024 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-countries-where-armed-conflicts-took-place