Data visualization project
Visualization for Peace
This project studies how peace processes affect life expectancy in countries with conflict. The original idea combines time series, signed peace agreements and a global world view to compare regions, detect changes and make the impact of war easier to read visually.
The project crosses Peace Agreements data with World Bank life expectancy indicators. From that, an interactive chart was built where each country evolves over time and treaties are marked on the series so their contextual content can be opened.
The main visualization lets you hide or show countries from the legend, while triangular markers indicate the years when a treaty was reached. Clicking them reveals the text associated with the agreement.
To support the main reading, the project also added a geographic view to observe life expectancy by year and a bubble view to quickly compare the number of treaties across regions and notable countries.
The technical detail of the process is still explained in Design of the visualization, but the original interactive visualization is available again here.
In the line chart, life expectancy is shown on the Y axis and years on the X axis. Treaty markers use the icon 
to highlight relevant milestones.
If one country is not relevant for a specific reading, you can hide it from the legend. There are also two buttons to enable or disable all countries at once, which helps when there are many series on screen.
Why this visualization helps analysis
The page does not try to prove automatic causality between a treaty and an immediate rise in life expectancy. Its value is to place several signals on the same timeline: country, year, signed agreement and indicator evolution. That combined reading helps detect cases that deserve a later review with more historical and statistical context.
Connection with related articles
The process connects with visualization design, the data preparation and the articles about text discovery when agreements also need to be analyzed as documents.
How to interpret the data without overstating conclusions
Life expectancy changes because of many factors: health systems, epidemics, displacement, economic reconstruction, access to clean water, food security and institutional stability. Peace agreements should therefore be read as contextual milestones rather than as a single cause. The visualization helps ask better questions: which countries improve after an agreement, which ones do not show a clear change and where the series needs more external context.
This caution matters because the project should not look like an automatic chart-only page. Its value is in combining data, documentation and critical reading, making clear that a visual correlation needs historical and statistical validation before becoming a strong conclusion.
Possible improvements to the project
A natural evolution would be to include additional sources: conflict intensity, displaced population, GDP per capita, health expenditure and institutional quality. It would also be useful to normalize country names with ISO codes to reduce dataset join errors and document years without data so interpolations are not interpreted as real values.
From a product perspective, the next step would be to turn each country into a navigable profile with summary, relevant treaties, filtered chart and source links. That would add more editorial depth and stronger internal linking to a project that already has a clear visual base.
It would also be useful to document the pipeline: source of each dataset, fields used, transformations applied, discarded years and cleaning decisions. That information turns the visualization into a reproducible piece and prevents the reader from trusting only the chart output.
The second part of the project groups treaties by world regions and combines that information with global life expectancy. This makes it possible to compare which continents accumulate more agreements and how average well-being changes over time.
The map can be changed by year and helps detect regional differences. Next to it, the bubble chart summarizes the relative weight of regions and countries especially affected by peace processes.