Conflicts Map
High-level diplomacy presents itself as the movement of states and leaders. A PLITO reading begins from the variable that surface conceals first: Labour — whose work, whose bodies, whose extraction feeds the global economy through a war. Then the other four: the people centred and erased, the ideas doing the justifying, the techne setting the terms, the objects actually at stake.
Selected ongoing conflicts as of June 2026. Tap a marker for the analysis structure. One full analysis (DR Congo) is published below as the working model; others are in preparation.
Text list of all conflicts on the map (for screen readers, or if the map fails to load)
- Revealed (headline): Russia–Ukraine War · Iran–Israel / US Confrontation · Israel–Palestine / Gaza · Lebanon (Israel–Hezbollah, ceasefire)
- Forgotten (known, unwatched): Sudan Civil War · DR Congo (Eastern — full analysis below) · Myanmar Civil War · Yemen · Venezuela · Syria · Mexican Drug War
- Invisible (near-unseen): Sahel Insurgencies · Nigeria (multi-front) · Somalia (al-Shabaab) · Ethiopian Insurgencies · Cameroon (Ambazonia) · Central African Republic · Mozambique (Cabo Delgado) · Libya · Haiti Gang Conflict · Ecuador Gang War · Colombia · Pakistan (militancy) · Afghanistan · India (internal insurgencies) · Philippines · Armenia–Azerbaijan (ceasefire)
- Under-reported (censored / untracked — markers only, no analysis): West Papua (Indonesia) · Pastoralist conflicts (South Sudan · Kenya · Chad) · Kurdish–Iranian insurgency · Amazon (miners vs. Indigenous)
Revealed, forgotten, invisible.
Before analysing any single conflict, PLITO reads the distribution of attention across all of them — because which wars are seen is itself a structured outcome, not a neutral fact. The same media architecture that covers one war wall-to-wall renders others nearly unseen, and the unseen ones are disproportionately those whose function is economic: the quiet supply of resources and labour to the global economy depends on not being looked at.
Headline wars
Iran–Israel, Ukraine, Gaza. Saturation coverage, named leaders, live maps. Geopolitically central; attention is abundant.
Known but unwatched
Sudan, DR Congo, Myanmar, Yemen, Venezuela. Vast death tolls, episodic coverage. Often where the clearest resource-and-labour story sits.
Near-unseen
Sahel, Cameroon, Somalia, Libya, Colombia, Ecuador, Pakistan. Minimal coverage. The function is frequently extraction, trafficking, or logistics.
Censored / untracked
West Papua, pastoralist clashes, Amazon mining frontiers, Kurdish–Iran. Blackouts and missing infrastructure mean the unseeing is structural — markers only, no analysis.
This is the People lens applied to the map as a whole: who is watched, who is not, and who benefits from the not-watching. The deeper a conflict's economic function, the dimmer the light tends to be on it.
Democratic Republic of Congo
The first published analysis, and the template every other follows: a plain description, the five lenses led by Labour, the interactions, and the meta-question. It is offered as a draft for revision, sourced and marked as such.
The war your devices are wired to.
The global economy's most intimate technologies — the phone, the laptop, the electric car — run on minerals dug by hand from the most-fought-over ground on earth, by people earning a few dollars a day, in a war the world has agreed not to watch.
Eastern DRC has been at war, in waves, for three decades. Since early 2025 the Rwanda-backed M23 movement has seized Goma and Bukavu, the two largest cities of the east, alongside more than a hundred other armed groups operating across the Kivus and Ituri. The fighting sits directly on top of some of the world's richest deposits of tin, tantalum, tungsten, gold, and cobalt. A US- and Qatar-brokered process has been under way through 2025–26; control on the ground remains contested.
Labour — the hidden substrate
Begin where the surface looks last. The coltan that becomes the tantalum capacitor in a phone is, at the Rubaya mine, dug by hand — by impoverished local miners earning a few dollars a day, with no machinery between their bodies and the ore. Rubaya alone supplies a significant share of the world's tantalum. Separately, in the cobalt belt, artisanal mining has been documented to involve child labour traced through refiners into the supply chains of the largest electronics and electric-vehicle brands on earth.
This is the labour the global economy is built on and structurally cannot see: it is informal, unrecorded, bodily, and deliberately distanced by a supply chain long enough to launder it. By the time the mineral is a component, the hand that dug it has been abstracted away entirely. The Labour lens restores it — and in restoring it, redraws the entire map of who this war is for.
People
Millions displaced; the people of the Kivus, present as casualties and labour, absent from every negotiating table. The diplomats and brokers, centred. And a neighbouring state, Rwanda, whose role as the war's dominant transit and laundering hub is documented by UN expert panels — present everywhere in the mineral flow, officially absent from the war.
Ideas
The naturalised idea doing the most work: that this is an ethnic conflict — ancient, tribal, internal. That framing (a constructed idea presented as a natural one) renders the mineral economy a backdrop rather than a driver, and quietly absolves the global consumer. The competing reading — that instability is functional, that weak governance lowers the cost of extraction — is the one the ethnic frame keeps offstage.
Techne
Two technologies decide the war's economics. The certification scheme (conflict-minerals due diligence) meant to clean the supply chain — and the relabelling that defeats it, as minerals crossing into Rwanda are mixed with Rwandan production and re-emerge "compliant." The tag meant to reveal origin becomes the tool that hides it.
Objects
Tin, tantalum, tungsten, gold, cobalt — and the territory they sit under. These are not the war's backdrop; they are, on this reading, its purpose. Control the ground, control the ore; control the ore, control a chokepoint in the world's electronics and battery supply. The object is small enough to hold in a hand and large enough to wire a planet.
The payoff is in the joints. The certification techne decides which labour is visible — and it is built to make the artisanal miner disappear. The ethnic idea decides which people count as the story's subjects — and it is built to keep the consumer out of frame. The objects (the minerals) anchor the whole circuit: they are why the labour is cheap, why the governance is kept weak, why the neighbour launders, why the idea must naturalise. Read through the joints, an "ancient ethnic war" resolves into a precise, contemporary, global supply mechanism with a battlefield at one end and a checkout button at the other.
This analysis was made from somewhere. It centres the miner and makes the consumer complicit — a framing with its own commitments, which a different analyst would contest: some scholars argue ethnic and security drivers are co-primary, not a cover for resource extraction, and that flattening the war into a supply-chain story erases the genuine local politics of the Kivus. That objection is correct to insist on. PLITO's claim is not that the economic reading is the only truth, but that it is the one the dominant framing is built to suppress — and that restoring it is the analyst's job. The reader is handed the same five questions to turn on this page.
Sources behind this draft
- UN Group of Experts on the DRC reports (2024–2025) — M23 financing, coltan flows, Rwandan involvement.
- Global Witness — conflict-mineral trade and laundering investigations.
- Amnesty International — cobalt supply-chain and child-labour documentation.
- USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries — DRC share of world cobalt and tantalum production.
- IPIS — eastern DRC mineral-site mapping.
The same reading, off the battlefield.
News coverage tells you what happened. A PLITO analysis asks what the event is made of: whose presence and absence, whose labour, which ideas doing the work of justification, what tools and techniques, what objects at stake. Political events — elections, summits, policies, scandals — will be added here using the same structure as the conflict analyses: plain description, five lenses, interactions, the turn. Proposals for events worth a structural reading are welcome via the contact details.
Why most analyses are still withheld.
A PLITO breakdown of an active conflict is a serious act of interpretation about events in which people are dying. Each analysis is researched, drafted, and reviewed before publication rather than generated to fill the map. The DRC analysis above is the first published; a marker without an analysis is a commitment, not an omission.
Marker summaries are kept deliberately sparse and low-claim where details are fast-moving or hard to verify from open sources — a wrong casualty figure or mis-attributed broker is its own kind of harm. The under-reported tier carries markers but no analysis at all: where blackouts and missing infrastructure make the facts genuinely uncertain, the honest record is that the conflict exists and is hard to see — not a confident account of it.