The world according to diplomats

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office issues travel warnings and advice for British citizens. See the snapshot they paint of the world today • Get the data The world is a scary place right now; what with the Japan disaster and the Arab and Middle East unrest. Where’s safe to go to? Well, for British citizens, the safety of foreign countries is ranked by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office – the FCO. The FCO regularly issues travel advice for British citizens, telling them where is safe to go. It’s obviously not the only foreign office in the world to do this – the US State Department does too , for instance. But the criteria are very different. The US issues 34 warnings for its citizens of places where the US Government’s ability to assist American citizens is constrained due to the closure of an embassy or consulate or because of a drawdown of its staff. So, as well as dangerous places like Iraq, it includes countries like North Korea or Iran, which have no US embassy. The UK’s definition is broader. It covers 53 countries where either no travel at all or essential travel only – to the whole country or part of it – is recommended. It’s all about safety. The definition means there are no restrictions on travelling to North Korea for instance – it just doesn’t take account of whether or not you’ll actually be able to get there. We thought it would be interesting to take a snapshot of those ratings – reflecting the turmoil in the world today. You can see the result above using Google Fusion tables – you may be able to do better (we had problems mapping Gaza and the West Bank, for instance). It’s a fascinating picture – not only of the UK’s world view – but also of conflict, disaster and terror in the world today. There are a load of caveats. Many of the warnings are against travel to specific regions – a distinction you won’t see on the map above. That includes countries like Russia, for instance – where the FCO advises against travel to regions caught up in violence, such as Chechnya or North Ossetia. The FCO also combines Israel and the Palestinian Occupied territories into one travel bulletin. You can download the full data below . What can you do with it? Data summary Download the data • DATA: download the full spreadsheet from Google Fusion tables More data Data journalism and data visualisations from the Guardian World government data • Search the world’s government data with our gateway Development and aid data • Search the world’s global development data with our gateway Can you do something with this data? • Flickr Please post your visualisations and mash-ups on our Flickr group • Contact us at data@guardian.co.uk • Get the A-Z of data • More at the Datastore directory • Follow us on Twitter • Like us on Facebook Conflict and development Japan disaster Arab and Middle East unrest Google Foreign policy Simon Rogers guardian.co.uk

Posted by on March 23, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.