Karim Bahgat holds an MA in peace and conflict transformation from the University of Tromsø in Norway, where he focused on the use of geographic information systems (GIS), opinion survey data, and open source programming tools in conflict studies. Since then, he has been employed as a research assistant for technical and geospatial work at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) and the International Law and Policy Institute (ILPI). Karim was part of the early prototyping of the PRIO-GRID unified spatial data structure for social science and conflict research, and is currently helping develop a new updated version (https://www.prio.org/Data/PRIO-GRID/).

His main use of technology, as a developer, has been with Python programming, geospatial tools and mapping, the geocoding of textual data, data visualization, application development, and some web technology. Karim is the author of a journal article publication, numerous data- and GIS-oriented Python programming libraries, the Easy Georeferencer free geocoding software, and several related technical websites, including www.pythongisresources.wordpress.com.