Armed conflicts have dropped 40 percent since the end of the Cold War and those that persist are killing far fewer people, says a three-year study that attempts to debunk current myths about war and peace.
“Over the past dozen years, the global security climate has changed in dramatic, positive, but largely unheralded ways,” the first Human Security Report said. “Civil wars, genocides and international crises have all declined sharply.”
And human-rights abuses have declined in five out of six regions in the developing world since the mid-1990s, according to the report prepared at Canada’s University of British Columbia in Vancouver and financed by five governments (Canada, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland and Britain).
However, even if these are receding, “high-casualty” attacks by terrorists are not. But international terrorism kills only a “tiny” number of people each year compared to those who die in war, the report said.
“We no longer have huge wars with huge armies, major engagements, heavy conventional weapons,” said Andrew Mack, an academic and former U.N. official, who directed the study, funded by Canada, Britain, Sweden, Norway and Switzerland.
“Today’s wars are low-intensity fought with light weapons, small arms in very poor countries. They are often extremely brutal but they don’t kill that many people,” he told a news conference.
The much anticipated report, three years in the making, found the total number of conflicts declined by 40 percent since the Cold War ended.
The average number of deaths per conflict also dropped from 37,000 in 1950, during the Korean War, to 600 in 2002.
Between 1991 and 2004, 28 armed struggles for self-determination started or restarted while 43 were contained or ended, the study said. In 2004, there were only 25 such conflicts - the lowest number since 1976.
Even the number of refugees dropped by 45 percent between 1992 and 2003 as more conflicts ended.
And despite the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the massacres at Srebrenica a year later and the continuing targeting of civilians in Sudan, Mack said the number of genocide and “politicides” fell 80 percent between 1988 and 2001.
Genocide is defined as the murder of groups because of their ethnicity, religion or nationality. Politicides are communal victims in opposition to a regime or dominant group.
The findings, Mack says, should help debunk fears that global human security is deteriorating.
Why do those fears persist, despite countervailing evidence? Mack lays principal blame on the media, which he says dwell on conflict while paying less attention to “quiet successes” and under-the-surface trends.
The Human Security Report identifies three major political changes over the past 30 years that have altered the global security landscape, Ramesh Thakur summarised for the Japan Times.
“The first was the end of colonialism: Until the 1980s, colonial wars made up 60-100 percent of all international conflicts. There are no colonial wars today.”
“The second was the end of the Cold War, which had driven approximately one-third of all conflicts since 1945. Washington and Moscow have stopped fueling “proxy wars” in the developing world.”
“Third, after the end of the Cold War there was an unprecedented explosion of international activities designed to stop ongoing wars and prevent new ones from starting.”
Despite the U.N. failures in Rwanda, Srebrenica and Somalia, the world body has a 40 to 60 percent success rate in stopping conflicts, said Mack.
“There has been an explosion in very broadly based peace operations that are essentially exercises in nation-building,” he said. “They make a difference particularly with respect to stopping wars from starting again, and that’s important because about 40 per cent of the wars that have been stopped in the past tend to start again.”
The increasing weight of world opinion and action is also having an impact on leaders and warlords who in another era would have felt no constraints on warmaking, says John Norris, a senior adviser with the International Crisis Group in Washington.
“There is an international rallying to the notion of a need to protect populations that are threatened in their own borders; it’s gained some traction,” Mr. Norris told the Christian Science Monitor.
But Ian Levine, program director at Human Rights Watch, told Reuters he was concerned that the report’s message might be construed as “we need not worry so much” and pointed to renewed debate on torture and the degradation of prisoners in Iraq.
“We feel at the moment we are fighting hard to protect international standards. There is a real danger of going backwards, “he said.
“Over the past dozen years, the global security climate has changed in dramatic, positive, but largely unheralded ways,” the first Human Security Report said. “Civil wars, genocides and international crises have all declined sharply.”
And human-rights abuses have declined in five out of six regions in the developing world since the mid-1990s, according to the report prepared at Canada’s University of British Columbia in Vancouver and financed by five governments (Canada, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland and Britain).
However, even if these are receding, “high-casualty” attacks by terrorists are not. But international terrorism kills only a “tiny” number of people each year compared to those who die in war, the report said.
“We no longer have huge wars with huge armies, major engagements, heavy conventional weapons,” said Andrew Mack, an academic and former U.N. official, who directed the study, funded by Canada, Britain, Sweden, Norway and Switzerland.
“Today’s wars are low-intensity fought with light weapons, small arms in very poor countries. They are often extremely brutal but they don’t kill that many people,” he told a news conference.
The much anticipated report, three years in the making, found the total number of conflicts declined by 40 percent since the Cold War ended.
The average number of deaths per conflict also dropped from 37,000 in 1950, during the Korean War, to 600 in 2002.
Between 1991 and 2004, 28 armed struggles for self-determination started or restarted while 43 were contained or ended, the study said. In 2004, there were only 25 such conflicts - the lowest number since 1976.
Even the number of refugees dropped by 45 percent between 1992 and 2003 as more conflicts ended.
And despite the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the massacres at Srebrenica a year later and the continuing targeting of civilians in Sudan, Mack said the number of genocide and “politicides” fell 80 percent between 1988 and 2001.
Genocide is defined as the murder of groups because of their ethnicity, religion or nationality. Politicides are communal victims in opposition to a regime or dominant group.
The findings, Mack says, should help debunk fears that global human security is deteriorating.
Why do those fears persist, despite countervailing evidence? Mack lays principal blame on the media, which he says dwell on conflict while paying less attention to “quiet successes” and under-the-surface trends.
The Human Security Report identifies three major political changes over the past 30 years that have altered the global security landscape, Ramesh Thakur summarised for the Japan Times.
“The first was the end of colonialism: Until the 1980s, colonial wars made up 60-100 percent of all international conflicts. There are no colonial wars today.”
“The second was the end of the Cold War, which had driven approximately one-third of all conflicts since 1945. Washington and Moscow have stopped fueling “proxy wars” in the developing world.”
“Third, after the end of the Cold War there was an unprecedented explosion of international activities designed to stop ongoing wars and prevent new ones from starting.”
Despite the U.N. failures in Rwanda, Srebrenica and Somalia, the world body has a 40 to 60 percent success rate in stopping conflicts, said Mack.
“There has been an explosion in very broadly based peace operations that are essentially exercises in nation-building,” he said. “They make a difference particularly with respect to stopping wars from starting again, and that’s important because about 40 per cent of the wars that have been stopped in the past tend to start again.”
The increasing weight of world opinion and action is also having an impact on leaders and warlords who in another era would have felt no constraints on warmaking, says John Norris, a senior adviser with the International Crisis Group in Washington.
“There is an international rallying to the notion of a need to protect populations that are threatened in their own borders; it’s gained some traction,” Mr. Norris told the Christian Science Monitor.
But Ian Levine, program director at Human Rights Watch, told Reuters he was concerned that the report’s message might be construed as “we need not worry so much” and pointed to renewed debate on torture and the degradation of prisoners in Iraq.
“We feel at the moment we are fighting hard to protect international standards. There is a real danger of going backwards, “he said.
