Definition
Conflict intelligence is the structured analysis of a conflict using publicly available information. The inputs are news reporting, government statements, official documents, satellite imagery, market data, court filings, and OSINT investigations. The outputs are records — events, claims, actor profiles, peace proposals, source assessments — each with explicit confidence labels.
The discipline is closer to journalism than to spying. The value is in the synthesis: turning hundreds of fragments into one coherent picture without inflating what is actually known.
What it produces
- Events: what happened, where, when, attributed to whom, with what verification status.
- Claims: discrete assertions by parties to the conflict, each with evidence for and against, and a current status.
- Actor profiles: structural positions, declared objectives, red lines, allies, constraints.
- Source assessments: how a given outlet is funded, who it speaks for, what its track record is.
- Confidence ratings: how strong the evidence is, separate from how widely a claim is repeated.
What it does not produce
- Forecasts of specific outcomes with high confidence.
- Operational advice for military, security, or commercial decisions.
- Verdicts on responsibility for incidents where the evidence is still developing.
- "The truth" as a single number — a casualty count, a yield estimate, a probability — without methodology.
Frequently asked
- How is this different from intelligence work inside governments?
- Governments have classified sources and operational consequences. Open-source conflict intelligence works only with public material. Its purpose is reader understanding, not policy action.
- Why do confidence ratings matter?
- Two events can both be reported by many outlets and still rest on very different evidence. Verification asks "has this been corroborated?". Confidence asks "how strong is the evidence underneath?". Both are needed.