Peace on Earth? Increasingly, Yes.

by Andrew Mack

Wednesday, December 28, 2005; Page A21

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.