A Map of 21st Century Conflicts in Europe

Please click here to download the map associated with this article. The Map of 21st Century Conflicts in Europerepresents collated information on five types of conflict and acts of terrorism within the geographic boundaries of Europe in the 21st century (January 2000–May 2010). It is compiled from data collected progressively by three teams of MSc students in Cartography at Vilnius University in Lithuania, in 2006, 2008 and 2010, totalling approximately 4,000 hours. The main goal of the project is to create an informative wall map, primarily for the general public, showing the spatial distribution of political, economic, ethnic, religious and social conflicts (not restricted to armed conflicts), as well as major terrorist incidents, while providing additional information to contrast with presently available maps that either are not specifically designed for visual analysis or encompass only a part of these conflicts, much smaller areas or shorter time spans. The project included planning, analysis of feasibility, data collection, verification, generalisation and filtering, classification of information on the conflicts, building the GIS database, analysis of data, and cartographic visualisation. The map described in this paper was finalised in 2010 and designed with special focus on the principles of cartosemiotics. It represents 118 conflicts and 35 major terrorist incidents. The remainder of the information is represented via summary choropleth maps and charts showing the statistics of conflicts in European countries by type, with textual descriptions. The relational database and exhaustive project documentation are available for further updates and development.