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Forget what you see on the TV, war is in decline

From the African bush to the shores of Indonesia, the number of wars worldwide has dropped to a new low, peace researchers report. But the face of conflict is changing, they say, and free-for-all violence is becoming more prevalent.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's newly released Yearbook 2006, drawing from data maintained by Sweden's Uppsala University, reports the number of active major armed conflicts worldwide stood at 17 in 2005, the lowest point in a steep slide from a high of 31 in 1991.

The Uppsala experts added one conflict to their list in 2005: the resurgent war that pits the four-year-old Afghan government and its US-led allies against fighters of the ousted Taliban. But they also subtracted three conflicts: those that ended in Rwanda, southern Sudan and Algeria, joining such other recent additions to the "peace" column as Liberia and Indonesia's Aceh province.

The deadliest war of 2005 was the complex conflict in Iraq, where estimates say a minimum of 50,000 people have been killed since the US-British invasion of 2003. The oldest conflict, dating to 1948, is the separatist struggle of the Karen people in Myanmar, or Burma.

Academics attribute war's long decline to multiple trends.

The era of decolonization, wars of independence and resulting civil wars has faded. The end of the Cold War halted US-Soviet "proxy" wars like Angola's of the 1970s and 1980s and enabled US-Russian cooperation on UN peacekeeping in the 1990s. Economic growth, especially in Asia, also quieted dissent that can produce wars.

"Research shows that the difference between US$1,000 per capita income and US$5,000 per capita income is huge as far as the risk of war," said Andrew Mack, director of the University of British Columbia's Human Security Center, which did an in-depth analysis of world conflict.

Mack and others point to "an explosion of international activism" as a key pacifying factor since the early 1990s -- the peacemaking and peacekeeping diplomatic and military missions mounted by the United Nations and other multinational organizations, such as the African Union. As a result, major African conflicts dropped from 11 in 1998 to three in 2005.

Despite this, Mack said, the "nature of media reporting" leads many people to believe war is on the rise.
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