The (relatively) peaceful 21st Century

The Human Security Centre at the University of British Columbia has published its first Human Security Report (The Human Security Report 2005.  War and Peace in the 21st Century), and things are looking pretty good.

For this report, the authors focus on violent threats to individuals.  (They note that this is a narrow definition of human security, and that a broader definition would include threats such as hunger, disease, and natural disasters).

Battle deaths are down (Figure 1.9 Numbers of Battle Deaths, 1946-2002):

The annotation on this figure reads: "The regional focus of battle-deaths has shifted from decade to decade. In this ‘stacked graph’, the number of deaths in each region each year is indicated by the depth of the band of colour, and the total number of deaths is indicated by the top line on the graph.  Source: Lacina and Gleditsch, 2004"

Battle deaths are only a part of the human security picture.  But things are looking pretty good across a range of human security metrics:

The extent of the change in global security following the end of the Cold War has been remarkable:

• The number of armed conflicts around the world has declined by more than 40% since the early 1990s...
• Between 1991 (the high point for the post–World War II period) and 2004, 28 armed struggles for self-determination started or restarted, while 43 were contained or ended. There were just 25 armed secessionist conflicts under way in 2004, the lowest number since 1976...
• Notwithstanding the horrors of Rwanda, Srebrenica and elsewhere, the number of genocides and politicides plummeted by 80% between the 1988 high point and 2001...
• International crises, often harbingers of war, declined by more than 70% between 1981 and 2001...
• The dollar value of major international arms transfers fell by 33% between 1990 and 2003.... Global military expenditure and troop numbers declined sharply in the 1990s as well.
• The number of refugees dropped by some 45% between 1992 and 2003, as more and more wars came to an end...
• Five out of six regions in the developing world saw a net decrease in core human rights abuses between 1994 and 2003....

The positive changes noted above date from the end of the Cold War. Other changes can be traced back to the 1950s:

• The average number of battle-deaths per conflict per year—the best measure of the deadliness of warfare—has been falling dramatically but unevenly since the 1950s. In 1950, for example, the average armed conflict killed 38,000 people; in 2002 the figure was 600, a 98% decline.
• The period since the end of World War II is the longest interval of uninterrupted peace between the major powers in hundreds of years...
• The number of actual and attempted military coups has been declining for more than 40 years. In 1963 there were 25 coups and attempted coups around the world, the highest number in the post–World War II period. In 2004 there were only 10 coup attempts—a 60% decline. All of them failed...

International terrorism is the only form of political violence that appears to be getting worse, but the data are contested...

I learned about this report from the Progressive Policy Institute's "Trade Fact of the Week" for December 27: The World Has Become More Peaceful .