Methodology

Purpose

A context platform, not a news service. Each conflict module explains what happened, where, who is involved, why it matters, and what to watch — and is updated on its stated cadence. All six published modules are reviewed every week. Each receives a dated weekly brief; quiet weeks explicitly record when no material change was identified. Baseline reference pages are under progressive source review. We are deliberately slower than the news and aim to be more durable than it.

This page states how Vigil works. The vocabulary it works in — proxy war, de facto authority, grey-zone pressure, state capacity — is defined separately, with the common misreadings noted.Read the glossary →

Status and cadence language

Every conflict module describes itself in the same three vocabularies, so a label on one card always means what it means on another.

Publication status — where a module is in its life:

• Published — live and usable, and still being expanded and reviewed. Every record inside it carries its own confidence grade, status date and stated gaps, so how settled any individual claim is never depends on this label.
• Preview — in development; reachable for editorial review only, never listed publicly.

Update cadence — how often a module is reviewed:

• Weekly review / event-driven updates — the module is reviewed every week; a verified brief is published when that review finds developments worth publishing. A quiet week is reported as a quiet week, not padded. Currently all six published modules.

A cadence is a review commitment, not a publication quota. Reviewing a module weekly means we look every week; it does not mean every week produces a brief, and it never means filling a quiet week with material that does not meet the evidence bar.

Content state — what a given page or brief is:

• Verified brief — a dated developments brief whose every item carries its own reporting window, sources and confidence grade.
• Analytical Note — a structured explainer connecting a single structural development to the wider system. Deeper than a brief item, narrower than a module; published event-driven, it does not replace a module's weekly brief and carries its own sources and confidence.
• Progressive source review — baseline reference pages being re-verified source by source; each record shows its own review date.
• Demo archive — clearly labelled illustrative samples preserved for transparency, never presented as reporting.

Each module additionally states its analytical type(interstate war, conflict system, regional system, regional transition, strategic flashpoint) and a small set of thematic tags — the "Contains:" line under a module header. Tags describe the kinds of content a module holds (energy, sanctions, displacement, corridor…), drawn from one small shared vocabulary. They are themes, never sides: no factions, no flags, no symbols.

Evidence and sources

We synthesise from public material: official statements, established media, OSINT and geolocation communities, satellite-derived reporting, international organisations, NGO and civil-society data, think-tank analysis, and market data. We do not use leaked, hacked, or operationally sensitive material.

Every citation on the site references a registered source by a stable id; the build fails if a record cites a source that is not in the registry. A source's type classifies how a claim is grounded — an official statement, an international-organisation dataset, an OSINT geolocation — not how true it is. How strongly the evidence supports the claim is a separate judgement, expressed by the confidence grade.Browse the full source registry →

What a grade is attached to

Vigil grades the claim, not the speaker. A government's statement is not high-confidence because a government made it, and a claim by a party to a conflict is not low-confidence because that party made it. Who said something is part of the evidence; it is not the grade. Where a statement is the fact — a declaration, a formal position, a legal assertion — the statement itself is what is recorded, attributed to its author.

An event, a claim about it, and an assessment of it are three different records. That something happened, that a party says a particular actor did it, and that Vigil judges the evidence one way, are separately dated, separately sourced and separately graded. Collapsing them is the most common way a conflict record becomes wrong: the event survives, the attribution turns out to be contested, and a single sentence carrying both takes the attribution down with it.

A confirmed physical event can coexist with a disputed attribution, and Vigil publishes both states at once rather than waiting for one to resolve or picking a side. An installation was struck and stopped operating; who struck it is contested between credible accounts; both facts are published, the dispute is described, and Vigil adjudicates nothing it cannot.

Absence of verification is not confirmation of anything.Where an inspection regime, a monitoring mission or an observation channel has stopped, what follows is that the state of the thing is unknown from that date — not that it continued, and not that it stopped. Vigil records the date access ended and the last verified position, and says explicitly that the interval establishes neither outcome.

Incompatible measurements are not the endpoints of a range.Where two figures count different things — a documented individual count and an unpublished estimate, a launch count and an impact count — they are published side by side with what each measures, and never as a low and a high of one number. A range implies a distribution, and there is no distribution across two different questions.

Confidence

Material quantitative claims are presented with an as-of date, a confidence grade, and a source wherever applicable — a value is shown with the context needed to weigh it, not on its own.

• High — multiple independent, credible sources agree; little serious dispute.
• Moderate — credible sourcing with known gaps, wartime distortion, or meaningful disagreement between estimates.
• Low — contested, unverifiable, or single-sourced; published only when the uncertainty itself is informative, and labelled as such.

Where a figure cannot be responsibly estimated, we say so — "not reliably estimable" is a legitimate published value here.

Why high confidence is the quietest colour

Confidence grades are coloured the opposite way round from most publications. High is the calmest grey on the page, Moderate is the site's amber, and Low is the only one that reaches for a warning colour. Most dashboards do the reverse — certainty in green, doubt in red — which trains a reader to skim for the green and to treat the qualified claims as noise.

Vigil inverts it because the colour should track how much is being claimed, not how comfortable the claim is: the louder the colour, the less Vigil is claiming. A high-confidence line needs no emphasis; it is the ordinary state of a published claim here. A low-confidence one is where a reader's attention is actually worth spending, so that is where the emphasis goes. The same scale and the same three colours are used everywhere a grade appears — briefs, notes, records, maps, Explore and exported images.

Dates and freshness

Vigil keeps several dates apart on purpose, because a single "updated" stamp hides more than it tells:

• Published — the date a publication object went out: a weekly brief, a global edition, an analytical note. It is not revised afterwards.
• Assessed as of — the date of the newest evidence supporting the current status or claim. Often older than the review date, and deliberately so.
• Last reviewed — the date Vigil most recently checked the record. It says when someone looked, not when anything was true.
• Changed in brief — a dated weekly brief explicitly recorded a change to this record, and links to it. Only an authored change counts; being mentioned in a brief is not a change.
• Conflict reviewed — the date a whole conflict was reviewed and briefed. It does not claim every record inside it was revalidated.
• Reporting window — the period a developments brief covers.
• Data-specific dates — leadership, economic statistics, formation status and equipment status each carry their own as-of date, which a page review never silently advances.

A recent review date does not make older evidence current.Vigil preserves the newest genuinely sourced status date rather than refreshing it to look up to date.

Events and relationships

The site links records to each other with typed, graded relationships, so a broad association never masquerades as a precise one.

What a link binds to:

• Event — a specific occurrence with a defined date or narrow time window.
• Campaign — a sustained sequence of related activity.
• Campaign phase — a distinct period within a wider campaign.
• Theme — a recurring issue connecting multiple events.

How an organisation relates to an event: participant, reported participant, attacking force, defending force, supporting force, affected organisation, historical association, and predecessor/successor involvement. A reported role is never shown as a confirmed one.

How equipment relates to an operator: service or branch operator, documented formation operator, reported formation association, historical operator, captured operator, donor, and prospective operator.

No link is preferable to an unsupported link. Every edge can carry its own confidence, date and sources; where an association cannot be supported, it is left out. See the cross-links on anyevent orForce Atlas record for worked examples.

What Vigil publishes: the record types

Every conflict module is a set of typed records, each with its own dates, confidence grade and sources, validated against one schema at build time. A page renders records; it never authors a claim of its own. The types:

• Module — the standing judgment about a conflict system: its lede, key facts, historical phases, the questions Vigil is following, and the economy and humanitarian sections described below.
• Actor — a party as it exists in one module: its objectives (stated and assessed, kept apart), constraints, leverage, red lines and standing analysis. The same real-world state has a separate actor record in each module it appears in, because what it is doing in one theatre is not what it is doing in another.
• Country — identity only: name, formal name, codes, capital, alternate names. Never a profile; every claim about a country lives on its actor records.
• Office — a named office of state and the dated succession of its holders. Rendered in Explore’s government panel and reached from the actor page.
• Relationship — a typed, dated, graded arrangement between two actors: alliance, defence agreement, security cooperation, economic partnership or dependency, material support, sanctions, basing, institutional membership, territorial dispute, adversarial posture, or a relationship credible sources dispute. Each has one authored record, read from either party’s side; the absence of relations is a status on the record, never a separate type.
• Formation — an organisation in the Force Atlas: its place in a tree, its lineage, its equipment associations and, where reviewed, its doctrine. A stub states structure and nothing else, and says so.
• Equipment — a family-level system record shared across modules, with its operators on the module edge.
• Location and zone — a place on the theatre map with its own summary, and a deliberately coarse area of status or influence. Zones are never published as documents, because a generalised polygon presented as a page would read as a precise claim.
• Terrain context — why the ground constrains what is possible. Strategic logistics — a supply system, its nodes, what depends on it and its dated disruptions. Campaign — a sustained effort, carrying its frame: an observed operation, a declared plan or an assessed contingency, which are three different kinds of claim and are labelled as such wherever they appear.
• Impact chain — a mechanism from trigger to effect in four stages, each step graded confirmed, plausible or unconfirmed. A plausible step is a scenario-like claim and is marked as one; a chain is never shown as more established than its weakest step.
• Economic exposure and humanitarian pressure — filing objects over the module’s own economy and humanitarian sections. An object names which commodities, analysis blocks, figures and observables belong to it and which records in other collections it runs through. It carries no figure, no date and no grade of its own beyond an exposure class, and it claims nothing twice.
• Event, historical phase, Weekly Brief, Analytical Note, glossary term, source and correction — as described elsewhere on this page.

Read and Explore: one model, two surfaces

Every record can be read as a page and, where it belongs to a module system, inspected in Explore — eleven modes per module over the same records. Both surfaces are rendered from one model per record family, and a test suite asserts that they cannot disagree: neither may label, grade or classify an object the other does not. A record page links to its own Explore selection; an Explore inspector links back to the page.

Aggregation adds no claim. The module Profile, the Economy and Humanitarian surfaces and the Explore panels compose records; they do not score, rank, total or average them. A grouped object shows the records behind it with their own dates and grades, and a figure that appears both as a module headline and inside a pressure is one record at two altitudes, not two numbers. Explore’s Evidence mode lists each record’s grade, review date, gaps and source count and computes nothing from them. Watch lists observables and questions in the module’s own words; nothing on any surface updates itself.

Provenance at every level

Sources are registry ids, resolved at build; an unregistered id fails the build. They are carried at the level the claim is made: on every record; on each block of economy and humanitarian analysis; on each humanitarian headline figure and on leadership figures; on each step of an impact chain, each holding of an office and each edge that names a formation’s equipment or an event’s participants. A block or figure without its own source rests on the section’s or the record’s sources, and the audits report it rather than fill it in. A citation opens theregistry entry first — the source’s type, role and stated limitation — with the original site one click beside it.

Watch and observables

Every conflict and most actor records carry a Watchsection. What it lists are observables, not predictions.

An observable is something that could be seen to happen, and that would change the assessment above it if it did. It is written so that a reader can check it themselves: the observable is deliveries rather than announcements about production, enactment rather than a bill being proposed, a verified movement rather than a claim of one.

Vigil publishes no forecast. There is no probability, no timeline and no sequence attached to any observable, and the absence is deliberate rather than a gap: naming what would change a judgment is checkable, and guessing when it will happen is not. Awatch item is the same idea inside a Weekly Brief — a standing file that was reviewed and found not to have moved, which is a finding rather than an absence.

Watch is not alerting. The section answers what would change the analysis, not what is happening now. It carries no severity, no priority, no status light and no ordering by urgency, and nothing on it updates itself: an observable moves when an editor reviews it and records what was found, including finding that it did not move. Vigil publishes no live feed, and a page that looked like one would be claiming a monitoring capability it does not have.

Safety: context, not targeting

Vigil describes conflicts structurally and historically. We do not publish current unit positions, force concentrations, base coordinates, movement tracking, or anything designed to support targeting. Our content model has no fields for such information — the rule is enforced by the site's build system, not by editorial memory. Front lines on maps are approximate and labelled illustrative. Force information is broad, delayed, and historical.

Map zones. Some maps carry broad coloured zones. Zones are approximate, contextual and non-operational: every zone is source-dated, confidence-labelled, and drawn with deliberately coarse geometry — the build system caps how much detail a zone outline may carry, so a zone cannot be drawn precisely even by mistake. Zones are not a live control map, and their meaning differs by conflict. For Ukraine–Russia, broad control zones do not show tactical boundaries or live unit positions. For Mali, zones show broad influence, activity, access pressure, or administrative context — influence and activity are not the same as territorial control, and no Mali zone claims otherwise. For regional-system modules such as the Caucasus, zones show de facto administration, historical conflict areas and broad corridor bands: a de facto zone is a status description, never a recognition claim; a historical zone marks where a past conflict was fought, never a current line; and old ceasefire lines are never presented as current control. For regional-transition modules such as Syria, an "administered" zone shows the broad administrative reach of a transitional government — deliberately not a consolidated-control claim — and all other zones are influence, activity or integration-status context; the vocabulary structurally cannot draw a front line.

No inferred route geometry. Where Vigil publishes the nodes of a corridor — a pipeline, a supply route, a transit lane — it publishes the nodes. It does not draw the line between them unless the geometry itself is sourced. An ordered list of places is not a route, and a line drawn through them would be an inference presented as a survey: it would state a path, a length and a set of intermediate locations that no source supports. Where a corridor is shown as an area, the area is the published geometry and is deliberately coarse. The absence of a line is intentional, and a corridor record says so rather than leaving a reader to wonder whether the map failed to load.

Sea areas. Some modules are about water rather than ground, and their zones are broad sea areas: an enclosed sea, the approaches to a strait, the open ocean beyond it. A sea area is orientation geometry only. It never depicts naval positions, patrol areas, transit routes, mined water or strike zones, and it never encodes whether a waterway is open — legal access, physical access and commercial access to the same water can differ at the same moment, and one fill cannot carry three answers. Where those three states diverge, the module says so in words and the map states none of them.

Regional systems and transitions

Some modules cover a linked regional security system rather than a single conflict. Each module states its type — interstate war, conflict system, regional system, regional transition, or strategic flashpoint — and groups its content into declared sub-theatres: distinct arenas whose events, locations, profiles and zones are tagged and validated against the module's own list. Grouping is analytical, not political — placing a record in a sub-theatre implies nothing about status or sovereignty.

A regional-transition module covers a post-war transition: the historical conflict is the backbone, the current transition is the subject, and the two are kept separate as claims. Historical control and battle context are dated as historical; current authority is described as status — "administered", "integrating under agreement", "outside state authority" — with confidence grades, never as settled fact; and disputed authority or autonomy is described through each party's position ("Türkiye considers…", "Kurdish-led authorities describe…", "Damascus states…") without adopting any side's terminology as the site's own voice. Foreign military presence is represented at broad structural level only, exactly as elsewhere on the site.

A strategic-flashpoint module covers a system where sustained pressure, deterrence failure or political escalation could produce a major crisis. It is not a prediction and not a countdown, and it does not track live operations: there is no front line, no activity layer and no scenario content. Vigil uses the type to connect public signals with geography, actors, capabilities, economic exposure and civil resilience — the structural picture that would matter if a crisis came, described while it has not. Where a flashpoint's routine activity is publicly reported and counted, Vigil treats the count as context, not as a threat metric: a quieter month is not de-escalation, and a busier one is not a timetable.

Regional-system modules apply this site's separation of historical and current claims strictly: entities that no longer exist are profiled as historical; forces that were disbanded carry their dissolution dates; and where sovereignty is contested, the module describes de facto authority, international recognition and each party's position separately — using formulations such as "de facto authorities", "internationally recognised as part of Georgia", or dual place-naming (Stepanakert / Khankendi) — without adopting any side's terminology as the site's own voice.

Strategic flashpoint modules cover systems where sustained pressure, deterrence failure or political escalation could produce a major crisis. They are not predictions and do not track live operations. Vigil uses them to connect public signals with geography, actors, capabilities, economic exposure and civil resilience. A flashpoint module has no front line and no control layer, and its map shows broad strategic geography only — never live military positions, patrol routes, force dispositions, air-defence locations, base layouts or operational vulnerabilities. Where such a module reports military activity, it reports officially published figures as one government's detections rather than as measured fact, and it describes no scenario for how an attack would be conducted or resisted. Where the underlying dispute concerns sovereignty, the module describes each party's position and does not adjudicate between them.

Neutrality

We describe; we do not advocate. Actors are labelled by role (belligerent, backer, hedger) and bloc, never as "friendly" or "hostile." Neutral framing does not mean false balance: where facts are documented — an invasion, an annexation, a strike on civilian infrastructure — we name them plainly.

Economics

Economic sections explain exposure and transmission channels at the level of sectors, commodities and instrument categories. Nothing on this site is investment advice, and we never recommend, rank, or name securities as opportunities.

Five quantities that are not each other

Reporting on infrastructure routinely collapses five different things into one number. Vigil keeps them apart, everywhere, and says which one it means:

• Capacity — what an asset is designed or certified to move. A design figure, often established once and never demonstrated since.
• Availability — how much of that capacity is physically usable now, after damage, maintenance or a constraint elsewhere in the system.
• Flow — what actually moved, measured, over a stated period.
• Dependency — what has no alternative if that flow stops. A route with a substitute and a route without one are different risks at identical volumes.
• Scenario — what would happen under an assumption. Always labelled, never mixed into the four above.

An alternative route's capacity is therefore never presented as relief, and production withheld because its outlet is unusable is not a loss of the resource. Where a figure is a forecast it is labelled as one and carries the vintage of the release that produced it: successive outlooks revise each other, and a revision is not a contradiction, but a March estimate quoted against a June forecast measures the release rather than the world.

A denominator is part of a share. "A third of global crude trade" and "a fifth of world petroleum liquids consumption" can describe the same flow and are not interchangeable. Vigil states what each share is a share of, and never mixes two denominators inside one comparison.

Corrections

Errors are corrected in place and logged publicly on thecorrections page, which is never purged. Material corrections are noted on the affected page. If you find an error, we want to know.

Limitations

These bound what any record on the site can claim:

• Public information is incomplete, and some of what matters is never disclosed.
• Wartime deception is deliberate — both sides shape what is visible.
• Organisational structures change faster than they are documented.
• Confirmation is often delayed; early accounts are revised.
• Casualty and equipment-loss estimates are uncertain and contested.
• Economic data in wartime is partial and lagged.
• The available sources carry their own selection biases.
• Translation across languages loses nuance.
• Absence from Vigil does not prove non-existence — it usually means the record has not yet met the publication threshold.

Profile completeness

Every organisation and equipment record states how complete it is, in the same four terms used on its badge:

• Full — reviewed prose, links, dates and sources are published.
• Partial — core information is reviewed, but some sections remain incomplete.
• Stub — a minimum structured identity and relationship record is published.
• Research required — the record remains hidden until it reaches the publication threshold.

Vigil prefers an honest stub over generic or invented prose.

Source registry

Every source Vigil cites is listed in a single registry, with its type, its role, and its stated limitation. Citations resolve against it by stable id, and the build fails on any unregistered reference.Browse the full source registry →

AI assistance

AI tools assist coding, formatting, drafting, and consistency checks. AI output is never treated as a source. Editorial responsibility and publication approval remain human. The full disclosure is on theAbout & Editorial Process page.

The standard

Vigil's standard is not perfect certainty. In conflict analysis, perfect certainty is often impossible. The standard is to show:

• what is known;
• what remains uncertain;
• why a claim is included;
• when it was last supported;
• and how it connects to the wider conflict.

When the evidence changes, the record changes with it.