[Paleopsych] open Democracy: Paul Rogers: A world becoming more peaceful?
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Paul Rogers: A world becoming more peaceful?
http://www.opendemocracy.net/conflict/report_2927.jsp
17 - 10 - 2005
The first annual Human Security Report finds despite evidence from
Afghanistan to Iraq, Chechnya to Congo that violent conflict around
the world is declining. Can this be true?
------------------------------------------
There appear good reasons for most people to think that the world is
becoming a more dangerous place. In the four years since the 9/11
attacks, the George W Bush administration has pursued a vigorous
counter-terrorism policy that has already terminated two regimes and
has, at a conservative estimate, seen at least 40,000 people killed,
most of them civilians. United States forces are mired in a deep and
bitter insurgency in Iraq, and almost 20,000 more troops are active
against a determined Taliban guerrilla force in Afghanistan; they have
also engaged in border clashes with Syria, and are involved in a tense
standoff with Iran over the latters nuclear developments.
If you find Paul Rogerss weekly [90]column on global security
valuable, please consider supporting openDemocracy by sending us a
[91]donation so that we can continue our work and keep it free for all
Despite this vigorous US strategy, the al-Qaida movement is able to
sustain its activities by launching numerous attacks around the world
(see the list of incidents in last week's column, [92]America, Iraq,
and al-Qaida).
This series of large-scale problems surely provide ample evidence for
the feeling that global security is threatened. In such circumstances,
for a substantial and carefully researched report to claim otherwise
seems a nonsense yet that is exactly the conclusion of the first
annual [93]human security report published today, 17 October, by the
[94]Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British
Columbia, Vancouver (and launched at the United Nations in New York).
The Human Security Report (HSR) co-financed by five [95]governments,
including Canada and Britain is modelled on that indispensable guide
to issues of development, the [96]United Nations Human Development
Report, though it is not itself a product of the UN system. It argues
that there has in fact been a marked decrease in political violence
since the end of the cold war. The number of armed conflicts has
decreased by more than 40%, and the number of major conflicts (which
it defines as resulting in 1,000 or more "battle-deaths") has declined
by 80%.
Among its other conclusions, it finds that interstate wars now
comprise only 5% of all armed conflicts, far less than in previous
eras; that the numbers of people killed in individual wars have
declined dramatically in the past five decades; and that the number of
international crises fell by more than 70% between 1981 and 2001. The
report also says that the number of autocratic regimes, noted for
their systematic attacks on human rights, is decreasing.
At first sight, the conclusions of the report seem to fly in the face
of everyday, tangible experience. However, the report is well
researched, carefully constructed and offers explanations for its
results. Moreover, it is not alone in its findings. For the past five
years, comparable if smaller-scale work by the [97]Center for
International Development and Conflict Management, University of
Maryland, has generated broadly similar conclusions. Its latest
biennial survey, [98]Peace and Conflict 2005, co-authored by veteran
peace researcher Ted Robert Gurr, also finds a marked decline in major
conflicts since the early 1990s.
One explanation these reports offer for the overall decrease in wars
in the last two decades is the ending of two of the main "drivers" of
conflict: decolonisation and the cold war. Both historical cycles were
marked by endemic conflict. The thirty years after 1945 saw numerous
small wars regarded as insurgencies or revolutionary threats by
colonial powers, and as wars of national liberation by the combatants
and their supporters in southeast Asia, Kenya, Cyprus, Algeria,
Angola, Mozambique, and many other places. There was also massive
internal violence surrounding other transitions to independence,
including the partition of India in 1947 and the birth of Bangladesh
in 1970-71.
Many of these conflicts had a [99]wider geopolitical aspect as proxy
wars between the United States and its allies and the Soviet bloc. It
was characteristic of this cold-war era that these wars, which killed
at least 10 million people and wounded 30 million, were fought in the
third world including Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Ethiopia/Somalia
rather than Europe.
When the two types of conflict, decolonisation and cold war, are taken
together, it is not surprising that (as the Human Security Report
points out) the two countries that have been most involved in
international wars since 1946 are Britain and France; the United
States and Soviet Union/Russia are next on the list.
The [100]cold war drew to its end in 1989-91 with the fall of the
Berlin wall, revolutions across east-central Europe and the collapse
of the Soviet Union. This period coincided with the first Gulf war in
1991 to expel Saddam Husseins forces from Kuwait, and was closely
followed by bitter conflicts in the [101]Caucasus (Abkhazia,
Nagorno-Karabakh, and Chechnya) and the [102]Balkans, as well as one
of the worst conflicts of the past century in the Great Lakes region
of Africa.
Alongside such violent and destructive events was a huge expansion in
peacekeeping and conflict-prevention initiatives, principally but not
only by the United Nations and its agencies. The Human Security Report
argues strongly that these initiatives have had a direct effect in
defusing some potential conflicts and easing others.
The [103]UN dimension is significant in anticipating possible
reactions to the report. The HSR is not an official UN product, but it
is very clearly sympathetic with that organisation, and this is likely
to induce cynicism from the UNs critics like US ambassador John Bolton
and others in American politics and media. At the same time, the
evidence the report gathers and the arguments it proposes are not
ideologically one-sided: it includes major caveats and is very far
from claiming that an era of universal peace is dawning.
The invisible casualties
The current political context makes the Human Security Report a rare
document that provides a more hopeful picture about current indicators
of conflict in the world. But a close reading of the HSRs detailed
analysis suggests two issues in particular that deserve closer
attention.
The first is the marked tendency it notes for people to flee from
major areas of conflict, seeking security either in neighbouring
countries or even further afield. This means that large numbers of
people are being exposed to sustained and often extreme dislocation
and hardship a trend that may well result in an underestimation of the
actual numbers killed and wounded in current conflicts.
The second issue is that in any case, the crude counting of casualties
can be hugely misleading, especially when conflicts are happening in
weak and impoverished societies. Most wars of the modern era take
place in just such societies, with sub-Saharan Africa being
particularly badly affected. In such circumstances, the effects of war
can take years or even decades to overcome.
The destruction of schools, hospitals and clinics, damage to farming
systems, marketing networks, ports and even bridges will have a far
greater effect in poorer countries where most people already live
close to the margins. The net effect frequently is to add to
malnutrition, susceptibility to disease and, especially, infant
mortality and death in childbirth in a manner that is almost entirely
missing from the simple, direct statistics of war.
Such impacts have, needless to say, been part of conflicts for decades
if not centuries. They should be of great concern today, because
alongside the great wealth and comfort of rich 21st-century societies
a huge proportion of the global human community lives on very basic
incomes with no guarantee of a stable future, while hundreds of
millions more barely manage to survive at all. It is arguable that no
social order that tolerates such vast inequalities can long endure.
Two sources of insecurity
These qualifications to the optimistic thrust of the HSR still leave a
conundrum: why can this report and other similar research suggest that
the world is becoming less violent and dangerous when so many analysts
and citizens find daily evidence to offer the opposite view?
There are perhaps two main explanations. The first is that it is
mainly people in the "Atlantic" countries especially the United States
and Canada, and western European countries such as Britain and Germany
who perceive a world of increasing violence. For this (in world terms)
elite group, which includes people directly involved in George W
Bush's "global war on terror", media coverage of Iraq and of al-Qaida
attacks helps create a pervasive view of global insecurity. But most
people in other parts of the world are more directly concerned with
immediate worries jobs, health and education, and even water, food and
shelter and any larger worries about war may well have diminished in
the past two decades.
The second explanation is that the 9/11 attacks really did have a
profound effect on the United States, by challenging a self-perception
of invulnerability that had previously been disturbed as long ago as
1941. The threat to the USs superpower dominance, leading to a war on
terror now approaching its fifth year, may actually be distorting its
understanding of the global picture of increasing security.
In addition to his weekly openDemocracy column, Paul Rogers writes an
international security monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group;
for details, click [104]here
A collection of Paul Rogerss Oxford Research Group briefings, Iraq and
the War on Terror: Twelve Months of Insurgency, 2004-05 is published
by IB Tauris ([105]October 2005)
These two arguments require careful attention, but also two strong
notes of caution in turn. First, the very vigour of the American
response to 9/11 may be creating the conditions for increased
instability and conflict. These counter-currents are most evident in
the middle east, whose rapidly growing energy resource significance
coupled with the [106]advent of China as a competitive agent reinforce
existing political tensions.
Second, the assessment of whether or not the world has become more
peaceful needs to accommodate the greatest human test of all the
response to climate change and all the many new insecurities that will
come in its wake if it is not brought under control. The "drying out"
of the tropics and the impact of global warming on the polar icecaps,
which now look increasingly possible, will overshadow every other
issue of [107]international security in the coming decades. The huge
pressure to migrate they are likely to bring is only one of their
likely effects.
These two cautions refer to problems that will dominate the coming
years and which can still just be addressed by making necessary policy
changes. It is in this political context that the Human Security
Report is a salutary reminder of what is possible. In many different
ways over the past fifteen years there really has been a
much-increased effort to prevent conflict, to resolve it when it
happens and to improve the worlds capacity for post-conflict
peace-building. In the context of so many forces and dynamics of
insecurity, that is a powerful message.
------------------------------------------
[108]Human Security Report
[109]"Peace and Conflict 2005" report
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