Since the end of the Cold War, armed conflicts have declined by 40 percent primarily because the UN was finally able to play the role its founders envisioned and launch peacekeeping and conflict-prevention operations around the world, according to a new study.
The first Human Security Report, which was financed by five governments, was released on Monday. The three-year study paints a surprising picture of war and peace in the 21st century: a dramatic decline in battlefield deaths, plummeting instances of genocide, and a drop in human rights abuses.
The only form of political violence that appears to be getting worse is international terrorism, a serious threat but one that has killed fewer than 1,000 people a year on average over the past 30 years compared to the tens of thousands killed annually in armed conflicts, it said.
Despite the dramatic improvements in global security, the report warned against complacency, noting that 60 wars are still being fought around the world, including serious conflicts in Iraq and Sudan's western Darfur region.
"The post-Cold War years have also been marked by many major humanitarian emergencies, gross abuses of human rights, war crimes, and ever-deadlier acts of terrorism," it said. "The risk of new wars breaking out -- or old ones resuming -- is very real in the absence of a strengthened and sustained commitment to conflict prevention and post-conflict peace building."
Nonetheless, the report said there also was no real cause for pessimism.
Professor Andrew Mack, who directed the study, said the end of the Cold War eliminated tensions between capitalism and communism, cut off US and Russian funding for proxy wars, and most importantly liberated the UN.
"With the Security Council no longer paralyzed by Cold War politics, the UN spearheaded a veritable explosion of conflict prevention, peacemaking and post-conflict peace-building activities in the early 1990s," the report said.
A Rand Corp study earlier this year concluded that the UN was successful in 66 percent of its peace efforts, but even the 40 percent success rate some believe is more accurate would be an achievement considering that prior to the 1990s "there was nothing going on at all," Mack said.
"We think the UN, despite the many failures, has done in many ways an extraordinary job ... very often with inadequate resources, inappropriate mandates, and with horrible politics in the council," Mack said. "If the politics were less horrible, the resources more adequate, and the mandates more appropriate ... the UN could do a much better job."
According to the report, armed conflicts have not only declined by more than 40 percent since 1992, but the deadliest conflicts with over 1,000 battle deaths have dropped even more dramatically -- by 80 percent. The number of international crises fell by more than 70 percent between 1981 and 2001, it said.
Notwithstanding the genocides in Rwanda in 1994 and in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica in 1995, mass killings because of religion, ethnicity or political beliefs plummeted by 80 percent between the 1988 high point and 2001, the report said. The year 1988 was marked by the end of the extraordinarily bloody Iran-Iraq war and former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's Anfal campaign, in which hundreds of thousands of Kurds were killed or expelled from northern Iraq.
Since the post-World War II era, the average number of battle-deaths per conflict per year -- the best measure of the deadliness of warfare -- has also been falling dramatically, though unevenly, the report said.
In 1950, the worst year, the average war killed 37,000 people directly, Mack said. "By 2002, it was 600 -- an extraordinary change."
The postwar period also saw the longest period of peace between the major powers in hundreds of years, and attempted military coups have been in decline for 40 years, the study found.
"Today most wars are fought in poor countries with armies that lack heavy conventional weapons -- or superpower patrons," the report said. "In a typical low-intensity conflict weak government forces confront small, ill-trained rebel forces equipped with small arms and light weapons."
But a few high-tech wars have been fought by the US and its allies since the end of the Cold War, first against Iraq to liberate Kuwait, then in Kosovo and Afghanistan where the huge military advantage led to quick victory and relatively few battlefield deaths.
"The current conflict in Iraq is the exception: while the conventional war that began in 2003 was over quickly and with relatively few casualties, tens of thousands have been killed in the subsequent -- and ongoing -- urban insurgency," the report said.
Mack, who directs the Human Security Center at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, said the report relies on major new data from the Conflict Data Program at Sweden's Uppsala University and other sources. He said its statistics were probably the best available, but emphasized that decent data on wars and conflicts remained hard to obtain.
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