Wars and ethnic conflicts have wreaked havoc on the economies and internal stability of developing countries around the world. Many of these are countries in name only, as the strife has fractured them into sections. For a small number of people around the world, however, wars and conflicts have been profitable.
Many operate out of places and countries that few Americans have ever heard of, so when the Center for Public Integrity's International Consortium of Investigative Journalists began its special report called "Making a Killing: The Business of War," it used ArcView 3.2 to create maps that illustrated the global connections of the weapons trade.
The center used ArcView to show places like Ostend, Belgium, an operating base of key weapons dealer Victor Bout. It also used the mapping software to show the location of the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea, where several states employ private military companies (once called mercenaries) and the location of the rich diamond deposits in the Congo.
The maps were largely locator maps and none required much advanced GIS work, but they did require research to locate information. The mapping work consisted of overlaying country shapefiles, national capitals and resource features from ArcAtlas: Our Earth, an ESRI data set. ArcAtlas lacked some of the resources that the Center wanted to show. For example, the location of oil fields in most cases was included, but not for those offshore. Additionally, resources such as uranium tailings in Angola were not included in the shapefiles.
To get the locations of other resources, the Center turned to other sources. One was the CIA World Factbook (www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/) with maps and information about every country.
Google searches found the Internet sites of global oil companies and information about their offshore sites.
Searches of the French newspaper Le Monde were used to locate some of the natural resources, such as diamond mines and oil fields. The Center used the National Geographic Web site, located at www.nationalgeographic.com, to find many of the cities not included in the ArcView shapefile of major world cities.
The Center used the ArcView legend editor and symbol palette to create unique symbols for the oil fields and diamond mines. The Center also changed the background color of the view from the default of none to blue, so the oceans appeared as blue.
Though the maps were a small part of the project, they helped by showing the locations of the places and key natural resources discussed in the project.
"Making a Killing: The Business of War" can be found online at www.icij.org/dtaweb/icij_bow.asp.
Contact Ron Nixon by e-mail at ron@ire.org.