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Peace on Earth? Increasingly, Yes.

Submitted by Jason White on December 30, 2005 - 6:03pm.
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The Washington Post
By Andrew Mack

(link) - Seen through the eyes of the media, the world appears an evermore dangerous place. Iraq is sliding toward civil war, the slaughter in Darfur appears unending, violent insurgencies are brewing in Thailand and a dozen other countries, and terrorism strikes again in Bali. It is not surprising that most people believe global violence is increasing.

However, most people, including many leading policymakers and scholars, are wrong. The reality is that, since the end of the Cold War, armed conflict and nearly all other forms of political violence have decreased. The world is far more peaceful than it was.

Why has this change attracted so little attention? In part because the global media give far more coverage to wars that start than to those that quietly end, but also because no international agency collects global or regional data on any form of political violence.

The Human Security Report, an independent study funded by five countries and published by Oxford University Press, draws on a wide range of little publicized scholarly data, plus specially commissioned research to present a portrait of global security that is sharply at odds with conventional wisdom. The report reveals that after five decades of inexorable increase, the number of armed conflicts started to fall worldwide in the early 1990s. The decline has continued.

By 2003, there were 40 percent fewer conflicts than in 1992. The deadliest conflicts -- those with 1,000 or more battle-deaths -- fell by some 80 percent. The number of genocides and other mass slaughters of civilians also dropped by 80 percent, while core human rights abuses have declined in five out of six regions of the developing world since the mid-1990s. International terrorism is the only type of political violence that has increased. Although the death toll has jumped sharply over the past three years, terrorists kill only a fraction of the number who die in wars.

What accounts for the extraordinary and counterintuitive improvement in global security over the past dozen years? The end of the Cold War, which had driven at least a third of all conflicts since World War II, appears to have been the single most critical factor.

In the late 1980s, Washington and Moscow stopped fueling "proxy wars" in the developing world, and the United Nations was liberated to play the global security role its founders intended. Freed from the paralyzing stasis of Cold War geopolitics, the Security Council initiated an unprecedented, though sometimes inchoate, explosion of international activism designed to stop ongoing wars and prevent new ones.

Other international agencies, donor governments and nongovernmental organizations also played a critical role, but it was the United Nations that took the lead, pushing a range of conflict-prevention and peace-building initiatives on a scale never before attempted. The number of U.N. peacekeeping operations and missions to prevent and stop wars have increased by more than 400 percent since the end of the Cold War. As this upsurge of international activism grew in scope and intensity through the 1990s, the number of crises, wars and genocides declined.

There have been some horrific and much publicized failures, of course -- the failures to stop genocide in Rwanda, Srebrenica and Darfur being the most egregious. But the quiet successes -- in Namibia, El Salvador, Mozambique, Eastern Slovenia, East Timor and elsewhere went largely unheralded, as did the fact that the United Nations' expertise in handling difficult missions has grown dramatically.

A major study by the Rand Corp. published this year found that U.N. peace-building operations had a two-thirds success rate. They were also surprisingly cost-effective. In fact, the United Nations spends less running 17 peace operations around the world for an entire year than the United States spends in Iraq in a single month. What the United Nations calls "peacemaking" -- using diplomacy to end wars -- has been even more successful. About half of all the peace agreements negotiated between 1946 and 2003 have been signed since the end of the Cold War.

With the Security Council often reluctant to act -- the abject failure to stop the Rwandan genocide remains a key example -- and with too many missions having been denied adequate resources, appropriate mandates or properly trained personnel, these successes are all the more remarkable.

In the wake of last month's global summit at the United Nations, many critics wrote the United Nations off as an institution so deeply flawed that it was beyond salvation. The analysis and the carefully collated data in the Human Security Report reveal something very different: an organization that, despite its failures and creaking bureaucracy, has played a critical role in enhancing global security.

The writer directs the Human Security Center at the University of British Columbia. He was director of the Strategic Planning Unit in the executive office of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan between 1998 and 2001.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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Other Opinions

Submitted by Peacetalk on January 16, 2006 - 7:25am.

Epidemiology of mad war
1/16/2006 10:15:00 AM GMT

700,000 people could be died as a direct result of the war

By: Nicolas J S Davies

War, deliberate violence between organized groups of human beings, has been a feature of human society for thousands of years. However the effect of war on non-combatants has changed dramatically in the past century. more....
http://www.aljazeera.com/me.asp?service_ID=10485.

Submitted by: http://www.propeace.eu
http://www.suraigu.com

Chronic Outrage

Submitted by Susan Livingston on January 6, 2006 - 11:17pm.

...is bad for your health. This constant stress has created new disease processes - Gulf War Syndrome, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome - and increased the incidence of older disease processes - Fibromyalgia, Cancer, an assortment of immune deficiency diseases - with a nasty common denominator called Adrenal Fatigue. Disease = DIS-EASE = lack of inner peace.

Work for outer peace, and inner peace will follow. "And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make." Wallow in your chronic outrage, and dis-ease will follow. Let's move forward on the path to holistic health and enlightenment in 2006!

Editor, propeace.net

Just the Facts, Folks!

Submitted by stereoman on January 2, 2006 - 7:18pm.

My little "speculative argument" red flag goes up whenever I read anything being attributed to "most people". I, personally, am not acquainted with the concept.

I would not be surprised to learn that a majority of Americans agree with the statement that "global violence is increasing", because it seems to me that Americans on the whole are fairly well insulated from global realities, or even accurate data about their own country. For example, how many Americans are even remotely aware of the extent to which violent crime has decreased in the US over the last ten years?

The global survey that Jason referred to spans the time period from 1992 to 2005, far longer than the average American's memory of current events. Who remembers that the first Iraq War claimed as many civilian casualties as the current one, in one-sixth the time? Who remembers how many hundreds of thousands died in the ensuing ten years of low-intensity warfare against the Iraqi people known as "sanctions"? How many Americans think of Africa first when the subject turns to casualties of warfare? Yet, consistently, that is where the vast majority of casualties occur.

For the sake of our futures, it seems to me of utmost importance that our fellow citizens are thinking in terms of reducing violence. Because of the recent exposures of the Administration's utter disregard for the rule of law and complete ineptitude in planning for the post-invasion realities in Iraq, more and more of our fellow citizens are rethinking their support for the State-sponsored violence being carried out in our names. It is increasingly likely that we will see a drawdown of US troops in the coming year.

At that point, it may become more possible for the UN, which Jason's cited article so well describes as the most capable agency for violence reduction in war-torn areas, to step in and begin the difficult task of implementing peaceful processes.

Let us hold this more fortunate outcome in our thoughts.

Steve

=========

What you do may not seem important . . . but it is important that you do it. (attributed to Mahatma Gandhi)

Evolving from forced PEACE to righteous PEACE

Submitted by Peacetalk on December 31, 2005 - 4:29am.

Nothing against bright pictures if they reflect the reality and we all wish that peace spreads all over the globe. Contradictory and constructive discussions are necessary and fructuous in order to point out injustice and suppression that are still wide spread all around this world.

When I talk about PEACE I mean a righteous just PEACE and not a forced and dictated PEACE or put it this way, evolving from forced PEACE to righteous PEACE

But let us recall all what happened during the last 12 years and what is happening every day:

Rwanda
Burundi
Bosnia / the peace is still very fragile
Kosovo/ the peace is still very fragile
Liberia
Chechnya
Afghanistan
Iraq
Ongoing and sharpened conflicts between Palestinians and Israelis
Human rights issues in China
Dafure
Increasing tensions between immigrants and natives in various European countries – think about the recent unrests in France-
September the 11th-
Increasing tensions among the various religious and ethnic groups all around the world.

The increasing poverty in the third world buries a potential for new conflicts.

------------------------------------------------
Latest violence news at the brink of the New Year:

UN 'shocked' by violence in Cairo

The UN refugee agency has expressed "shock" after up to 20 Sudanese migrants died during an operation by Egyptian police to break up their camp.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, said there was no justification for the violence.

Thousands of police stormed the camp - which was set up near UN offices in September - wielding truncheons and firing water cannon at the protesters.

Several children were reported to be among the dead.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4570446.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/05/africa_enl_1135937838...

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submitted by : http://www.propeace.eu/english/index.htm

courage to see the balance

Submitted by Jason White on December 31, 2005 - 12:54am.

Peacetalk wrote:
This picture is very bright and exhilarate the NEW YEAR mood, but it does not correspond to the facts. There is no doubt that violence in INCREASING.
...
Maybe we have accustomed to the violent news we observe every day or we tend to repress these facts.

This contradiction captures the purpose of this website perfectly.

We are saturated with messages of conflict and violence. When we see these stories in the media, why don't we protest this way of looking at the world just as you have done in the first statement above? Why don't we say, "sure this is a very dim picture, but it does not correspond to the facts. There is no doubt that a global grassroots movement to increase the role of conflict resolution and peace building is gaining strength"? Are we brave enough to see the bright picture?

The point of propeace, in my view, is to counterbalance the negativity that pervails with something positive. There are plenty of news media and Internet sites that play on our fears and emotions by reporting only outrageous atrocities. The propeace community needs to emphasize to the world that not everything that happens is like that, that there are positive actions being taken and positive ways of looking at the world.

Can you find them and report them?

What we focus on expands.

Violent*Peace

Submitted by Rainbow Brain on December 31, 2005 - 12:50am.

That violence seems to be increasing, is only because it is now turning back on man, that which man has violently brought upon himself and the planet, will bring more violence, a top down view of the system can not see its base, bring peace to that base and the next years will be filled with the joys of truth and the peace of love.

BL*M

Love*Rulz - @
Timeless-ink-Press.com

Yes Violence is increasing.

Submitted by Peacetalk on December 30, 2005 - 6:43pm.

It is not surprising that most people believe global violence is increasing.

This picture is very bright and exhilarate the NEW YEAR mood, but it does not correspond to the facts. There is no doubt that violence in INCREASING. After the end of the cold war we have experienced many violent and terrific conflicts:

- Iraq 1
- Iraq 2
- Genocides in Rwanda and Burundi
- Increasing Terrorism

etc.

Not only this, the whole society is more violent than ever, violence in the schools, in the street and in the families.

Maybe we have accustomed to the violent news we observe every day or we tend to repress these facts.

I wish you a PEACEFUL NEW YEAR