Sentinel
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Every country in the world, scored for instability.

Sentinel reads five open signals, turns them into one number for all 197 countries, and recomputes it four times a day. When something moves, the map moves with it.

The Sentinel map, showing country borders lit by instability score across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
The ten highest, seven-day average 22 August 2026
1Iran
2Ukraine
3Israel
4Palestine
5Russia
6Lebanon
7Afghanistan
8Yemen
9Syria
10Somalia

All ten sit in the High band, which starts at the tick. The app names the band, not the decimal, so the bars are shown the same way. Averaged over the 28 runs of the last seven days, so one bad reading cannot move the order.

How the number is built

Five signals, one score.

The weights are fixed and applied the same way to every country, so a quiet week in one place means what it means in another. Nothing is tuned per country after the fact.

Conflict intensity30%
Event severity20%
Protest activity20%
Media tone15%
Conflict attention15%

Three bands, and where the world sits.

The scale runs 0 to 100. Which band a country falls in matters more than the exact figure, so the app leads with the band and keeps the number beside it.

Low under 35134
Moderate 35 to 6542
High 65 and above21

Countries in each band, latest run of 197 scored.

What sits on the map

Layers you can switch on, and where each one comes from.

Every layer names its source in the app, in the same words used here. If a feed is down, the layer says so rather than drawing an empty map.

Wildfires

Thermal detections from orbit, filtered to the fires that are an event where they are burning.

NASA FIRMS

Fire danger

What could burn today, from the European forecast model, rather than what is already alight.

Copernicus

Airtankers

Water bombers currently airborne, tracked live from receivers run by volunteers.

Community ADS-B network

Military aircraft

Strategic transport, tankers and surveillance aircraft in flight, from the same open network.

Community ADS-B network

Nuclear sites

Civil and military nuclear facilities, plotted from the open structured database.

Wikidata

Choke points

The maritime straits where a large share of world trade has to pass through a narrow gap.

Sentinel

An editorial decision, published

A satellite can see 24,284 fires. We put 933 on the map.

Instruments in orbit detect heat, not intent. Across the southern African savanna, August is burning season: land cleared on purpose, every year, on schedule. A global ranking of raw detections would be a list of farmland, every day, indefinitely.

So fires are ranked inside each country instead of against the world. Every fire in a country where fire is an event, and only the significant ones where burning is routine. Filtering is not hiding. It is the whole job.

24,284Active detections seen from orbit
933Fires shown on the map
197Countries ranked against themselves

Counts read 22 August 2026. They move with every satellite pass.

Inside a country

A Sentinel country page for Ukraine, showing the score, the band, and a written account of what is happening.

What is happening now, in words.

Open a country and the ranking stops being the point. The page opens on a written account of what is driving it, then what the same situation is doing to the countries around it.

Its band, and the hour it was last computed
What is happening now, point by point
Regional impact, country by country
What a market prices for the months ahead
Fires burning inside the borders, and the news

What it costs

The index is free. The depth is not.

Reading the world costs nothing. Pro is for the people who go past the first reading every day.

Free

$0

  • The global risk index, all 197 countries
  • The daily brief
  • Three articles a day
  • One country dossier a day

Pro

$3.99 a month, or $29.99 a year

  • Unlimited dossiers and articles
  • The full countries index and comparison
  • The global tension map and every layer
  • The full event timeline

Seven days free. Cancel any time before it ends.

See where the world is tense, before it reaches the headlines.

Android is in the works.