Conflict and security
Global burden of armed violence
Armed violence: counting the cost
Authors:
Publisher:
United Nations [UN] High Commission for Refugees , 2008
The report brings into focus the wide ranging costs of war and crime on development and seeks to provide a solid evidence base to shape effective policy, programming, and advocacy to prevent and reduce armed violence. The report also highlights some of the less visible forms of armed violence, including sexual and gender based violence, extrajudicial killings, kidnappings, and forced disappearances.
The author gives details of other issues such as:
- Direct conflict death
- The many victims of war: indirect conflict deaths
- Armed violence after war: categories, causes, and consequences
- Lethal Encounters: non-conflict armed violence
- Estimating the economic costs of armed violence
- Armed violence against women.
Key findings/conclusions, include:
- More than 740,000 people have died directly or indirectly from armed violence both from conflict and criminal violence every year in recent years
- More than 540,000 of these deaths are violent, with the vast majority occurring in non-conflict settings
- At least 200,000 people have died each year in conflict zones from non-violent causes that resulted from the effects of war on populations
- Non-violent deaths that can be directly linked to conflict should count as part of the burden of armed violence, since from a human perspective it matters little if a parent or child dies from a bullet or from dysentery soon after an armed clash
- Armed violence and its aftershocks tend to persist well after the formal fighting stops
- Multilateral peace and security operations have expanded to deal with irregular forms of war, up to and including peace enforcement operations, and to engage in the longer-term process of post conflict peace- and state-building and democracy promotion
- Quantifying the costs of armed violence is critical to draw attention to the way such violence impedes development.
