Of the 158 countries monitored in Peace and Conflict 2003, 34 received red flags, including Afghanistan, Egypt and Kenya. Africa has the greatest concentration of red flags with a total of 26 (plus 14 yellow-flagged countries), with the ledger indicating that Nigeria and Congo-Kinshasa are among the most critical countries in the region. There is little good news across the African continent, with only six (green-flagged) countries identified as having the capacity to manage internal strife: Benin, Botswana, Mali, Namibia and South Africa in sub-Saharan Africa, and Libya in North Africa.

Red flags also ring the Middle East from North Africa to the Caucasus and Afghanistan. There, the tangle of threatening crises is topped by the nuclear threat in the India-Pakistan conflict—which caps the world’s second most serious crisis zone, the Asian heartland.

The majority of the world’s major armed societal conflicts have been concentrated in the Asian and African continents since the end of the Cold War, and, with Asia home to about half the world’s population, this crisis zone is of particular concern. Problems are most prevalent in three regions: (1) a south-central complex centered on the red-flagged countries of Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan; (2) a Middle East complex with red-flagged countries in the Caucasus, Armenia and Azerbaijan; and (3) a southeastern complex where green-flagged Thailand finds itself sandwiched between red-flagged Myanmar (Burma) and Cambodia.

There are 50 yellow-flagged countries with a mix of positive and negative factors. One yellow-flagged country, India, for example, has stable democratic political institutions but poor human security and limited resources. Russia also falls into this category, with positives for democracy, resources and its neighboring environment, but has just-established democratic institutions, poor human security and a mixed record for managing self-determination.

Just under half of all countries are green-flagged, including the well-established Western democracies, most of Latin America and the Caribbean (except for yellow-flagged Peru and Haiti), and most of the former Socialist countries of Europe (with the notable exceptions of yellow-flagged Belarus, Bosnia, Croatia, Russia and Yugoslavia). In fact, the number of fully democratic states in the world has nearly doubled according to the report, jumping from 42 in 1985 to 83 last year.

Those successes are counterbalanced somewhat by the still unfolding confrontation between terrorist acts and the U.S.-led war against terrorism. “This high profile confrontation has contributed strongly to the polarization of forces and the development of a ‘siege mentality’ in both ‘camps’ as many believe their most personal, core values to be under assault by the ‘other,’” states the report. It goes on to say that these conditions contribute to “persistent tensions between Muslim and non-Muslim populations in places like Sudan, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Bosnia, the Caucasus, South Asia, Indonesia and the Philippines.”

CIDCM issued a similar report in 2001. As noted earlier, Peace and Conflict 2003 says gains in peace and democracy have been sustained over the past two years and in some instances improved. During 2002, peace accords were reached in two of the world’s longest and deadliest civil wars—in Angola and Sudan. Also, international diplomatic pressure helped push India and Pakistan back from the brink of nuclear war.

Still, the report indicates that the world now finds itself at a crossroads of sorts. Global warfare has been reduced by more than 60 percent since 1991, according to the authors, but what remains are, in many cases, the most intractable conflicts. Monty Marshall, the other principal author of the report, and Gurr are concerned that the U.S. and other countries will disengage from the most difficult conflicts and instead rest on their laurels, convinced that partial success is the best that can be achieved in some cases.

“Just as protracted societal conflicts tend to spread ill effects when they are ‘in bloom,’” the report states, “the insidious qualities of past and future conflicts tend to contract and withdraw into the most ‘intractable’ conflicts. These are the linchpins of regional and global security. Peace is a social process, not simply a goal or an accomplishment.”

In the short term, the authors of Peace and Conflict 2003 believe that this process will continue on a worldwide basis, as will the downward trend in the total magnitude of global warfare. Nevertheless, they feel that the best that can be expected is for the trend to level off in the foreseeable future. “The threat of violence and war has been a major instrument in both international and domestic politics for a very long time and it would be naïve to think that the option of force would suddenly cease to be used,” the authors write.

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