Most attention goes to who holds which territory. Territory is the most visible variable and among the least predictive: control changes hands without changing whether anyone can tax, adjudicate, protect or deliver a service in the area concerned.
The consequential question is what wartime institutions become. Resistance administrations, ethnic institutions and local networks are already governing — and whether those practices converge toward a federal compact or harden into separate systems of authority is decided while the fighting continues, not after it stops.
Seven frames compete over the same country: civil war, democratic revolution, federal transformation, humanitarian emergency, war economy, regional buffer, climate multiplier. Each makes some actors and responses visible and others invisible, which is why the observatory tracks the frames alongside the evidence.