The report, Peace and Conflict 2003, developed with funding from Carnegie Corporation of New York, says that warfare has decreased 60 percent globally since 1991. International crises have dropped nearly 50 percent, and the number of democracies has doubled since 1985. In just the last two years, nine separatist wars have moved from the battlefield to the negotiating table.

But the report warns that this new stability in former trouble spots is fragile. The war with Iraq and nuclear tensions with North Korea head the list of challenges that cast a shadow over the recent increase in peace and security. Others include the ongoing struggle against terrorism, unresolved tensions in Afghanistan and the former Yugoslavia, increasing violence in Colombia, and continuing tensions between nuclear powers India and Pakistan over Kashmir.

The new global peace still reigns uneasily over “48 [unstable] regimes, 33 societies recovering from recently ended wars, and 25 societies still locked in violent struggles,” the report states. In a world of increasing tension, these poor and war-ravaged societies are prone to instability and state failure. This combination of growing tension and vulnerable societies presents crucial challenges to U.S. policymakers.

The report cautions against “the perception, increasingly influential in the U.S., that some security threats are impervious to peaceful or multilateral solutions,” a clear reference not only to the clash among nations like France, Germany and the U.S. over America’s Iraq policy but to a growing trend toward unilateral action in U.S. foreign policy that is at odds with the world view of the majority of European countries and others in regions around the globe.

Military force may be necessary to contain some crises, says Ted Gurr, one of two principal authors of the report and a University of Maryland professor of government and politics, but war shifts international attention and resources away from long-term constructive efforts at conflict management. And it risks spillover effects that destabilize other areas.

The centerpiece of Peace and Conflict 2003 is a catalog and ranking of conflict within nations—what the report calls a “peace and conflict ledger.” It rates 158 countries using eight measures of capacity for building peace and avoiding armed conflict. Among them are: avoidance of recent armed conflict; successfully managing movements for self-determination; maintaining stable democratic institutions; attaining substantial material resources; and being free of serious threats from neighboring countries. Based on whether a country has successfully achieved those parameters or not, the ledger assigns red or yellow flags to mark weak or vulnerable situations, and green flags for countries with the capacity to effectively manage internal conflicts.

“For many scholars, the reports produced by CIDCM encourage scrutiny of its key online databases on ethnic and other conflict-related issues,” says Stephen Del Rosso, senior program officer in the Corporation’s International Peace and Security program. “These databases have a multiplier effect because scores of experts in this field rely on this information to help inform their own work. There is no more comprehensive data set on these issues. It provides a jumping-off point that allows scholars to fill in any perceived gaps or focus on analysis without having to engage in the time-consuming task of data gathering. In addition, CIDCM’s reports put the organization’s own data into a policy-relevant framework and reach conclusions that can be either challenged or expanded upon. Before you can have good policy you need good ideas, and they need to be backed up with empirical data rather than anecdotal evidence.”

Expanding on how his interest in this work intersects with the wider concerns of the Corporation’s International Peace and Security program, Del Rosso says, “I was originally interested in supporting CIDCM because I was intrigued by some of its counterintuitive conclusions about the decline in ethnic conflict in the world, and how they challenged much of the conventional wisdom in both the scholarly and policy communities about this phenomenon. Similarly, work being done by The Carr Center and The Fund for Peace (Ed. Note: see the following stories) both offered unique and important perspectives on conflict issues that seemed to be missing from the debate in both communities just when the sets of issues under examination were becoming most relevant.”

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