An Updated Look at Trends in Political Violence

The Center for Systemic Peace (CSP) has just posted an updated version of its Major Episodes of Political Violence data set, which now covers the period 1946-2014. That data set includes scalar measures of the magnitude of several forms of political violence between and within states. Per the codebook (PDF):

Magnitude scores reflect multiple factors including state capabilities, interactive intensity (means and goals), area and scope of death and destruction, population displacement, and episode duration. Scores are considered to be consistently assigned (i.e., comparable) across episode types and for all states directly involved.

For each country in each year, the magnitude scores range from 0 to 10. The chart below shows annual global sums of those scores for conflicts between and within states (i.e., the INTTOT and CIVTOT columns in the source data).

Consistent with other measures, CSP’s data show an increase in violent political conflict in the past few years. At the same time, those data also indicate that, even at the end of 2014, the scale of conflict worldwide remained well below the peak levels observed in the latter decades of the Cold War and its immediate aftermath. That finding provides no comfort to the people directly affected by the fighting ongoing today. Still, it should (but probably won’t) throw another blanket over hyperbolic statements about the world being more unstable than ever before.

If we look at the trends by region, we see what most avid newsreaders would expect to see. The chart below uses the U.S. State Department’s regional designations. It confirms that the recent increase in conflict within states (the orange lines) has mostly come from Africa and the Middle East. Conflicts persist in the Americas and East and South Asia, but their magnitude has generally diminished in recent years. Europe and Eurasia supplies the least violent conflict of any region, but the war in Ukraine—designated a civil conflict by this source and assigned a magnitude score of 2—increased that supply in 2014.

CSP saw almost no interstate conflict around the world in 2014. The global score of 1 accrues from U.S. operations in Afghanistan. When interstate conflict has occurred in the post–Cold War period, it has mostly come from Africa and the Middle East, too, but East Asia was also a major contributor as recently as the 1980s.

For a complete list of the episodes of political violence observed by CSP in this data set, go here. For CSP’s analysis of trends in these data, go here.

Posted by Jay Ulfelder on April 29, 2015

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