About the Observatory
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 eight languages and 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. Our members have received support and contributed to:
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.
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.
We founded The Frontline Observatory because we were asked to. From Congo to Lebanon to Iraq, on-the-ground communities in warzones shared their fatigue and self-silencing. Because when the information that shapes the international response is dictated by armed actors, civilians die. Childhoods are lost. Violence endures. By working with the on-the-ground networks with closed-door access, we can flip the script — through higher-quality evidence tools and methods that detect and correct for systematic error in mainstream data sources.