The report identifies and examines major trends in global political violence, asks what factors drive these trends and examines some of the consequences.
Over the past dozen years, the global security climate has changed in dramatic, positive ways. Civil wars, genocides and international crises have all declined sharply. International wars, now only a small minority of all conflicts, have been in steady decline for a much longer period, as have military coups and the average number of people killed per conflict per year.
Key findings:
- In most parts of the world the drop in conflict numbers started after the end of the Cold War. But in two important regions the decline started earlier. In the Middle East and North Africa, political violence began to decrease at the beginning of the 1980s. In East Asia, Southeast Asia and Oceania the decline in both the number and deadliness of armed conflicts started in the mid-1970s. Most of the world’s armed conflicts now take place in sub-Saharan Africa. The combination of pervasive poverty, declining GDP per capita, poor infrastructure, weak administration, external intervention and an abundance of cheap weapons, plus the effects of a major decline in per capita foreign assistance for much of the 1990s, mean that armed conflicts in these countries are difficult to avoid, contain or end. However, there are signs of hope. The new Uppsala/Human Security Centre dataset shows that the number of conflicts in Africa in which a government was one of the warring parties declined from 15 to 10 between 2002 and 2003. These changes reflect the increased involvement of the international community and African regional organisations in conflict resolution and post-conflict reconstruction, rather than major changes in the underlying risk factors.
- The major wars of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s did not generate large flows of displaced people. Between 1980 and 1992 the total number of people estimated to have been displaced increased from 16 million to more than 40 million. Increased targeting of civilians appears to be a major reason for the huge increase. Genocides and other deliberate slaughters of civilians have declined. The 80% decline in the number of genocides since the end of the Cold War has been twice as great as the drop in the number of conflicts. There is a relatively low death toll resulting from international terrorism, however, it is still a major human security concern.
- Over the past three decades two changes in international politics have had a huge but little analysed impact on global security. Between 1946 and 1991 there was a twelvefold rise in the number of civil wars—the greatest jump in 200 years. By the early 1980s the wars of liberation from colonial rule, which had accounted for 60% to 100% of all international wars fought since the early 1950s, had virtually ended. With the demise of colonialism, a major driver of warfare around the world—one that had caused 81 wars since 1816—simply ceased to exist. In the late 1980s, the Cold War, which had driven approximately one-third of all wars (civil as well as international) in the post–World War II period, also came to an end. With the colonial era and the Cold War, global warfare began to decline rapidly in the early 1990s. Between 1992 and 2002 the number of civil wars being fought each year plummeted by 80%.
