Organized violence, 1989–2016

Abstract

The dramatic increase in the number of fatalities in organized violence, seen between 2011 and 2014, did not continue in 2015 and 2016. Rather, the notation of some 131,000 fatalities in 2014 was followed by a steep decline, with just below 119,000 in 2015 and a little over 102,000 fatalities in 2016. Despite the decrease, the number was the fifth highest during the entire 1989-2016 period. Most of the fatalities -over 87,000 -were incurred in statebased conflicts, the main driver behind the trend. Just as the number of fatalities, the number of state-based conflicts, albeit remaining on a high level, continued to decrease in 2016, going from 52 to 49, with 12 of them reaching the level of war, with at least 1,000 battle-related deaths. Also the non-state conflicts dropped in number in 2016, from 73 to 60. This was followed by a decrease in the number of fatalities, and only one conflict caused more than 1,000 deaths. Twenty-one actors were registered in one-sided violence, down by five from 2015. A number this low has only been recorded twice before; in both 2009 and 2010, 21 one-sided actors were listed in UCDP data. The number of fatalities also decreased, going from almost 9,800 to a little over 6,000.

Cascades of Violence: War, Crime and Peacebuilding Across South Asia

“…The nature of the medium-term trends has become more uncertain than they were at the time of Pinker's (2011) work. Battlefield deaths increased sharply from 1911 (the Libyan and Balkan wars) and did not begin to descend back towards nineteenth-century levels until the 1990s-although Syria, Iraq and many other smaller conflicts such as Yemen, Ukraine and renewed fighting in the DRC are driving battle deaths up again at the time of writing (Allansson et al 2017). Violent deaths rose in a period when those who are shot and stabbed on battlefields and in domestic crimes benefit from stupendous progress in the speed with which medics get them to hospitals to save their lives.…”

A human rights tragedy: strategic localization of US foreign policy in Colombia

“…78 These civilian activists actively advocated for Source: Uppsala Conflict Data Program (http://ucdp.uu.se/). 73 labour rights and opposed neoliberal economic reforms, a political stance that made them direct targets of Colombia's counterterror cooperation.…”

Limited Intervention: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Limited Stabilization, Limited Strike, and Containment Operations

“…SOURCES: UCDP ACD data (see Gleditsch et al, 2002;Allansson, Melander, and Themnér, 2017) and authors' calculations. …”

“…The data and codebooks, which are updated annually, can be found at UCDP, "UCDP Downloads," web page, undated. Also see Gleditsch et al, 2002;and Allansson, Melander, and Themnér, 2017. 12 Data on which states were neighbors to one another come from the Direct Contiguity data set. See Douglas M. Stinnett, Jaroslav Tir, Philip Schafer, Paul F. Diehl, and Charles Gochman, "The Correlates of War Project Direct Contiguity Data, Version 3," Conflict Management and Peace Science, Vol.…”