World Beyond War: A global movement to end all wars

USA’s Military Empire: A Visual Database
The United States of America, unlike any other nation, maintains a massive network of foreign military bases around the world.

How was this created and how is it continued? Some of these physical installations are on land occupied as spoils of war. Most are maintained through collaborations with governments, many of them brutal and oppressive governments benefiting from the bases’ presence. In many cases, human beings were displaced to make room for these military installations, often depriving people of farmland, adding huge amounts of pollution to local water systems and the air, and existing as an unwelcome presence.

To explore this database, click on map markers or use the dashboard to make selections:

Why We Built This Database
This visual database was researched and developed by World BEYOND War to help journalists, activists, researchers and individual readers understand the immense problem of excessive preparation for war, which inevitably leads to international bullying, meddling, threats, escalation and mass atrocity. By illustrating the extent of USA’s empire of military outposts, we hope to call attention to the wider problem. Thanks to davidvine.net for a variety of information included herein.

How You Can Help
Please help spread the word that information about USA’s military empire is available to the public.

This database is a work in progress, using information gathered from various public data sources. If you see errors or omissions, please let us know.

World BEYOND War is seeking funding to continue the research, data collection and software development for this project and other related map/database projects highlighting the problems of global militarization. We hope to improve this app in the following three ways:

Include More Countries

The current version only includes data about USA’s foreign military outposts, but future versions of this app will include information about foreign military bases maintained by all nations.

Increased Scope of Information About Each Base

Much information is available about the effect of foreign military bases on local communities and populations. We hope to track more data points covering more aspects of the severe problems caused by these military outposts.

World BEYOND War hopes to continue to produce original, high-quality, information-rich presentations for the use of the global antiwar movement. This requires investment in coding and UX skills. We are seeking funding to improve this app, customize it for different types of screens, and allow us to build more information-rich presentations of various kinds.

These maps are built with free software provided by Mapbox, which uses publicly available geographic data sets that do not easily allow altering the shape of the maps or the choices of what counts as a separate nation and what does not. World BEYOND War supports local self-governance everywhere and does not accept any occupations or colonizations.

Please become a World BEYOND War donor to support this and other projects. If you would like to sponsor or become a contributor to our Close Military Bases activities, please contact us.

Learn more about bases and our campaign to close them here.

World BEYOND War is a global nonviolent movement to end war and establish a just and sustainable peace.