In this report, we analyze reported conflict fatalities, focusing on Africa due to its superior data coverage between 1997 and 2025. Through a series of temporal and spatial visualizations, we illustrate the evolving landscape of continental violence. Our findings reveal an overall increasing trend in fatalities, with a notable historical spike in 1999, where battles consistently dominate as the deadliest event type. We map exact conflict hotspots emerging in the 2020s and categorize the hierarchical proportions of specific violent events. Additionally, by examining the thirty most affected nations, we identify the continent’s most persistent conflict zones over the past three decades. Finally, observing the exceptionally high casualty rates in Angola during the late 20th century, we provide an animated, granular breakdown of the 1998 crisis to map the exact toll and geographic progression of the violence.
Firstly, we examined what regions are covered by the provided data set. We plotted reported fatalities across continents and concluded that Africa provided the most comprehensive data.
Focusing on Africa, as the region with the most data, we show how total fatalities change over the years. Here we start to utilize interactivity to show more insight for the curious ones. Due to some missing values we omitted the first and the last year in the data set. Because of high data variability, we settled on logarithmic scale to accurately present both less and more peaceful countries.
On this chart, we dive into particular event types. Narrowed year range remains. We can clearly see 1999 spike and overall increasing trend as well as battles dominating the chart.
Here we plot exact positions of conflicts from 2020 onward. Default selection of battles is made to avoid clutter. Marker size represents event severity.
We used an interactive multi-level pie chart to show exact proportions between various event types and their corresponding subevent types.
The heatmap shows at a glance total fatalities in each year. For clarity, we took into account only 30 countries with the most fatalities. Partially lacking data from 1996 and 2026 can be seen as brightened bars on either side of the graph, however it does not interfere with the rest of the data thus we did not limit the year range.
Noticing exceptionally high fatalities in Angola around the end of 20th century, we decided to animate exactly where these events took place and what toll they took.