The Trend of Decline in Armed Conflicts Around the World Continues...

Last April, I wrote about the Human Security Centre's Human Security Report; now, the Human Security Brief for 2006 has been released. And, despite the current struggles in the world against Islamic terror (including the ongoing suffering in Rwanda and the Sudan), and in spite of the negativity of sensationalistic if-it-bleeds-it-leads brand of news reporting, the downward trend in organized armed conflict appears to have continued:

The Human Security Brief 2006 updates the 2005 Human Security Report's conflict trend data and analyzes the findings of two recently released datasets that track trends in war terminations and organized violence against civilians.

The new data indicate that the post-Cold War decline in armed conflicts and related fatalities reported last year has continued, with Sub-Saharan Africa seeing the greatest decrease in political violence.

Other encouraging trends include continuing declines in the number of genocides and other mass slaughters of civilians, and a drop in refugee numbers and military coups.

But some of the other findings are far from positive. Four of the world's six regions have experienced increased numbers of conflicts since 2002 [um....Baghdad?] the last five years have seen a huge spike in the estimated death toll from terrorism, while negotiated settlements, which are responsible for an increasing proportion of conflict terminations, have worryingly high failure rates.

The last paragraph doesn't shake my belief that our direct engagement with Islamic terrorism has been necessary, and has been the right course to take. Things always get worse before they get better; and by bringing the War to the terrorists, we are merely smoking out the cancer cells that would otherwise still be festering like a malignant tumor upon the free world, smouldering and metasticizing in the shadows.

Read the full report