About

The Frontline Observatory is a group of researchers, investigators, and on-the-ground civilians in the world’s gravest conflict zones. Together we hold fluency in Arabic, English, French, Kurdish, Spanish, Swahili, Ukrainian, and Urdu, as well as decades-long, vetted, trusted connections across multiple continents. We have testified before international courts and contributed evidence to sanctions decisions in the US, EU, and UN. Members have earned support from the Fulbright Foundation, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and published in high-level outlets across policy (Foreign Policy, Lawfare, the Wilson Center), academia (International Organization, Journal of Conflict Resolution), to expert witness reports for courts and various UN bodies.

In the regular course of our day-to-day lives and work, we’ve visited prisons. Spoken with coroners. Interviewed death squad participants—and their victims. Negotiated with rebels. Documented mass graves. Lived under paramilitary control. Encountered atrocities from mass machete killings to bombings to illicit financial markets.

And despite working across distinct conflict zones, we confronted two common puzzles:

The type of evidence—confessions, original financial records, internal rebel files, paramilitary documents, material evidence of weapons and wound patterns—are at a level of rigor that exceeds typical, publicly-available sources.

Such information available on-the-ground, behind closed doors in conflict zones often reveals realities of violence that differ dramatically from the versions that emerge in official or international accounts.

There is a simple reason why this is the case: It’s part of the logic of war.

Our Approach | Adapting Evidence and Methods to Wartime Realities

Information about conflict is conflict-affected information.

In settings of coercion and clandestine operations, there are more reasons to alter information than to tell it straight.

  • Armed actors routinely distort even seemingly basic “facts” from perpetrators, illicit markets, to transnational sponsors.
    • For strategic advantage and financial gain
    • To avoid international sanctions
    • To avoid advertising violations of international law
    • To elevate their threat profile and claim attacks they did not commit (in the case of pariah groups)
  • Those in the know who may wish to disclose information typically keep quiet
    • Civilians fear attacks from militants (in and outside the state) for disclosing information
    • Defectors fear reprisal from civilians and often live in hiding from former combatant groups
In conflict zones “there's a reason you know what you know. Data does not fall from the sky.”
—Patrick Ball, Statistician for Human Rights

In these environments, the information that rises to the surface is what is safest to disclose and most closely conforms to militants' party line. Put otherwise, conflict introduces systematic error between easily visible, public information and the information that is kept hidden.

This means, in order to get it right, requires systematic, rigorous tools to 1) get beneath the surface to access the more sensitive, higher-quality evidence, and to 2) detect and account for effects of misinformation in existing data streams.

We achieve these goals with a distinctive model that builds from the ground up.