Geopolitical history, month by month.

The point is context: headlines make every month feel like the edge of a wider war. This is the long view, from the standard academic dataset on organized violence — so you can see whether right now is actually unusual, or ordinary for a hard decade.

How to use it

• Toggle series on the left, zoom to an era with the slider or a preset, and hover any chart to read the exact count for that month.

What you get

• Armed-conflict deaths and events worldwide, as monthly totals back to 1989, from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) — plus a breakdown by the kind of violence.

The two groups

• Armed conflict — worldwide — total deaths from organized violence each month, and the number of discrete events. Deaths are what the tool is about; events ride alongside as the steadier, wider-spread line.
• What kind of violence — deaths split three ways: state-based (a government is a party — Ukraine sits here), non-state (organized groups with no government party — militias, cartels, communal violence), and one-sided (violence against unarmed civilians). The three sum to the total.

Reading these honestly

“Normal” here is not peace. With Ukraine and Sudan inside the record, an ordinary recent month is still a violent one. The scale is dominated by a few events — 1994 alone carried 824,177 deaths (the Rwandan genocide, almost all one-sided) — so zoom to an era rather than reading the whole record at once, or a single year will flatten everything else.

Deaths lead the tool, not events, on purpose: a hundred skirmishes are not a war, and one massacre is. Events show how widely fighting is spread; deaths show how deadly it is.

Good to know

UCDP publishes about two months behind, so the last month or two on the chart may still fill in. This is a context chart, not a forecast — it tells you where today sits against the record, not what happens next.