Despite billions spent and decades of effort, there is more conflict today in 2025 than any time since World War II.

According to Siri As Rustad, Research Director at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) and lead author of the 2025 PRIO’s Conflict Trends: A Global Overview report, 61 conflicts were recorded across 36 countries in 2024: “This is not just a spike – it’s a structural shift. The world today is far more violent, and far more fragmented, than it was a decade ago.”

Conflict zones have expanded 65% since 2021. That’s 6.15 million square kilometers, nearly twice the size of India, now affected by armed conflict. The Sahel’s “conflict corridor” now spans 4,000 miles from Mali to Somalia.

Conflicts are also becoming more complex within states. Data from the PRIO Conflict Trends report shows that over half of countries affected by conflict feature two or more separate state-based conflicts. According to a 2023 analysis in The Economist, contemporary civil wars have evolved significantly:

• The average length of civil wars has risen from around 13 years in the 1980s to about 20 years in 2021
• The number of simultaneous wars and insurgencies within the same territory has risen from around 5 (between 2001 and 2010) to 15 today
• Contemporary civil wars involving international armed forces have increased from 4% in 1991 to 48% in 2021

If your company operates in emerging markets, has supply chains through Africa or Southeast Asia, or is evaluating expansion into frontier economies, this matters. Most business leaders don’t realize their standard operational risk assessments weren’t designed for this reality. These assessments track formal governance indicators and historical conflict data. When territorial control shifts weekly and an average of 170 distinct armed groups are active each week in a single country like Myanmar, the standard tools simply can’t contend with what’s happening on the ground.

Today, I’m sharing what businesses need to know when planning operations in markets where conflict dynamics are at play.

Let’s dive in.

Standard risk assessments track the wrong indicators.

Most corporate risk models rely on country-level stability indices, historical conflict data, and formal governance metrics.

These work in stable markets. But in fragmented conflict zones, they miss what actually determines whether operations succeed or fail.

Your risk assessment might show a country as “improving” based on national indicators while the region where you operate deteriorates rapidly. Or it might flag a country as “high risk” uniformly, missing that some regions remain stable while others are inaccessible. The Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, is routinely characterized as unstable and conflict-ridden, despite the reality that it’s a huge country with conflict mostly contained in the far East.

To appropriately gauge operational assumptions, risks models need to track the right indicators, at the right level of analysis, at the right frequency. Failure to model correctly in conflict-affected locations increases the likelihood of disruptions, asset damage, and safety incidents.

What does this look like?

Community-level intelligence matters more than country-level data.

Companies that maintain operations successfully in complex environments don’t rely solely on macro indicators. They invest in granular, community-level intelligence.

This means understanding which armed groups control which territories, how local power dynamics shift seasonally, what grievances communities hold against external actors, and where operations might inadvertently escalate tensions. In fragile markets, the difference between sustainable operations and sudden shutdown often comes down to whether you understood local stakeholder dynamics, and how your operations are interacting with these dynamics.

Companies that operate in these contexts well do so by building relationships with local civil society organizations, community leaders, and conflict monitors who provide real-time intelligence that standard reports miss. They map stakeholder relationships across conflict divides, identify historical grievances, and understand how business decisions interact with local tensions.

This helps identify which communities will actively support operations versus which might resist them, allowing you to structure your presence accordingly.

Your supply chain assumptions may need updating.

When violence escalates, roads become impassable. Border crossings shut down. Local suppliers disappear. Workers can’t travel to facilities.

Violence patterns in conflict zones can follow seasonal cycles, election timelines, resource competitions, or external political events that trigger spikes difficult to forecast. Businesses that maintain supply chain resilience in these environments build flexibility into their models: multiple supplier options across different regions, pre-positioned inventory, alternative transportation routes, and real-time monitoring of conflict dynamics that might affect operations.

Scenario planning that accounts for “access improves,” “access deteriorates,” and “access becomes impossible” is essential. And modeling the financial implications of each scenario before committing to operations can greatly improve the chances of success.

The bottom line.

Conflict zones are fragmenting in ways that affect supply chains, market access, workforce safety, and long-term asset security for companies operating in or sourcing from emerging markets.

The expansion from 2.8% to 4.6% of global landmass, the increase from 5 to 15 simultaneous conflicts within the same territories, and the rise in civil war duration from 13 to 20 years all represent substantial shifts. As the global stabilizers that held conflict at bay – like the United Nations – strain under the pressure of a changing global world order, we should expect these trends to continue, not reverse.

The businesses that will maintain operations successfully are those who understand that operating in fragmented conflict zones requires different intelligence, different stakeholder relationships, and different planning approaches.

If you’re reading to update the operational playbook in your business, let’s connect.