A new study by the Simon Fraser University-based Human Security Report Project (HSRP), released today at United Nations headquarters in New York, offers compelling evidence that, post-World War II, there is a significant decline in the frequency and deadliness of armed conflict.
The report demonstrates a rapid decline in international wars over the past 60 years. In fact, the average number of international wars being fought each year has shrunk dramatically, from over six in the 1950s, to less than one during the 2000s.
"This matters because international wars kill far more people on average than do the far more numerous civil wars," says HSRP director Andrew Mack.
The report also states that while the total number of armed conflict types (i.e. not only international wars) have increased threefold from the 1950s to the end of the Cold War, most of those conflicts were low-intensity civil wars with relatively modest fatality counts.
From the early 1990s, until present day, overall conflict numbers have dropped 40 per cent, while the deadliest conflicts, those that kill at least 1000 people per year, have declined by more than half.
The study also proposes that organized criminal violence is contributing to the increasingly high murder rates in Latin and Central America. Gang murders in Mexico, most drug-related, increased six-fold between 2006 until 2011, while the murder rate in Mexico was greater than the death toll from combat in Afghanistan, Sudan, or Iraq.
More information: The complete study is available online at www.hsrgroup.org
Provided by Simon Fraser University
