Spring 2026 21 2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY G E O G R A P H Y Van Den Hoek says the hardest impact to monitor is also the most important, and the one he cares about most deeply: the effects of conflicts on people. His approach can’t say whether there were people in a building when it was destroyed, or where survivors went after an attack. But his team is trying to track the migration of people in war zones and gain insights into what post-conflict life looks like for both refugees (people who leave their country due to disaster) and internally displaced people (those who leave home but stay within their own country’s borders). “There’s a weight, a burden to this work. I want to do it in a way that’s helpful to others, and I recognize that it affects a lot of extremely vulnerable people,” he says. “I think the continuing goal is to do this work in a rigorous way, with shareable outcomes that are relevant not to understanding the war per se but understanding how to lessen the harm on civilians. “The global humanitarian system is in tatters right now, in the worst shape it’s been in for a long time. I’m hoping for a turning point and hoping that our work of the last couple of years can serve as an example of what can be done transparently and collaboratively.” “THERE ARE HALF A DOZEN CONFLICT AREAS IN THE WORLD THAT SHOULD BE GETTING MORE ATTENTION.” The Data Behind the Headlines When major news outlets want to understand the devastating impact of war, they often turn to OSU’s Jamon Van Den Hoek and his Conflict Ecology lab. In the 2024 article “What Ukraine Has Lost,” The New York Times’ graphics editor Marco Hernandez and senior editor Tim Wallace created an arresting set of charts, using the lab’s data, that provided the first visualizations of the war’s destruction. “I consider myself very fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with Jamon,” Hernandez said. “The work he does is exceptional and has made it possible to inform our readers not only about what is happening in Ukraine but in many other parts of the world, with an accuracy and efficiency that no one else has been able to achieve before.”
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