Matt Bamberger - The Human Security Report

The Human Security Report

Tue, 01/30/2007 at 23:55

The most important news item you've never read

The Human Security Report, published in 2005 by the Human Security Centre at the University of British Columbia, is IMHO one of the most important pieces of news to come out in the last decade, and also one of the least widely covered. Briefly, it's an in-depth look at the human impact of war, genocide, and political killings. The report's findings will probably come as a great surprise to anyone who's been relying on the mainstream (or, for that matter, the "alternative") media. Among other findings:
  • The number of genocides and politicides dropped by 80% between 1988 and 2001.
  • The number of armed conflicts worldwide has dropped by more than 40% since the early 1990s.
  • The dollar value of the international arms trade fell by 33% between 1990 and 2003.
Obviously, something dramatic has occurred over the last decade or two. The report proposes a couple of possible explanations:
  • The majority of the world's conflicts were directly related to the liberation of colonized states and to the cold war. The colonial era had ended by 1980, and the cold war ended a decade later.
  • War and other large-scale violence is much more common in poor countries. Rising global prosperity has sharply decreased the number of countries in that category.
  • Peace-keeping efforts by the UN and other organizations have increased dramatically since the early 1990s. While many of these efforts have had limited individual success, the report argues that their cumulative influence has been substantial.
War and related forms of large-scale violence are tremendously important, not only because of their appalling direct moral impact, but also because of their catastrophic effect on global development and their linkage to a variety of existential risks. This is an excellent analysis of the causes of war, and of the solutions to it.
Go read the report.