Forthcoming book: The Human Security Report

The forthcoming Human Security Report is a great idea:

Modeled on the UN's Human Development Report, the Human Security Report will provide an annual mapping of the incidence, intensity, causes, and consequences of global violence and policy responses to that violence. Each report will carry a series of essays focusing on a thematic issue. The theme of the first issue will be "War in the 21st Century".

Launched a fortnight ago, but not due to be published by Oxford University Press until the end of this month, the report has been produced by Andrew Mack and his team at the Human Security Centre, based at the University of British Columbia.

Funded by five governments and three years in the making, it tracks and analyses trends in political violence around the world. Some of the findings, as reported in the press kit, may surprise. As summarised in a free 12 page Overview (PDF), the report takes issue with claims that:

° The number of armed conflicts is increasing.
° Wars are getting deadlier.
° The number of genocides is increasing.
° The gravest threat to human security is international terrorism.
° 90% of those killed in today’s wars are civilians.
° 5 million people were killed in wars in the 1990s.
° 2 million children were killed in wars during the last decade.
° 80% of refugees are women and children.
° Women are the primary victims of war.
° There are 300,000 child soldiers serving around the world today.

Not one of these claims is based on reliable data. All are suspect; some are demonstrably false. Yet they are widely believed because they reinforce popular assumptions. They flourish in the absence of official figures to contradict them, and conjure a picture of global security trends that is grossly distorted. And they often drive political agendas.

It notes the remarkable extent of change in global security since the end of the Cold War:

° The number of armed conflicts around the world has declined by more than 40% since the early 1990s (see Figure 1.1 in Part I).
° 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 (Figure 1.11).
° International crises, often harbingers of war, declined by more than 70% between 1981 and 2001 (Figure 1.5).
° The dollar value of major international arms transfers fell by 33% between 1990 and 2003 (Figure 1.10).
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 (Figure 3.1).

Provocative, readable and well documented - this report should cause some waves. (Hat tip: Robin Varghese at 3 quarks daily).