Saturday, February 23, 2013

A battle to find a peaceful place on the globe – the Conflict History database


It’s a battle to keep up with all the information available on the fabulous World Wide Web.

There’s so much out there on innumerable web sites and blogs that every now and then you come across fascinating information only by chance. Indeed the StumbleUpon site is built on this very aspect.

A site that I’ve just stumbled upon all by myself is CONFLICT HISTORY where you can browse the time of wars and conflicts across the globe.

It’s based on Google Maps and there’s a slider at the bottom where you select a particular time period. You can expand/collapse a table in the top left, and use this table to provide a link to each war or battle (and there’s a Wikipedia cross reference for each).

For example, the period 1995 – 2002 looks like this, with a link showing for the 2000 UEFA Cup Final riots:

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Yes, all sorts of events have been selected as conflicts, which adds to the fascination. In the above example, also included is an accumulation of places on Earth that I previously browsed, fortunately they didn’t all apply to the 1995 – 2002 time period!

It’s a sad indictment on mankind that there’s nary a time period nor place on the globe which is (or has been, at some point in history) free of conflict.

UPDATE:
The site is working at the moment (23 February 2013). Just ignore the initial message and close the black dialog box:

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