Human Security Report 2007

This Brief focuses on three main issues. First, it challenges the expert consensus that the threat of terrorism—especially Islamist terrorism—is increasing. It tracks a remarkable, but largely unnoticed, decline in the incidence of terrorism around the world, including a sharp decrease in deadly assaults perpetrated by al-Qaeda’s loosely knit Islamist global terror network. Second, it analyzes the marked decline in the number and deadliness of armed conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa that have taken place in the new millennium. It attributes this decline—and the parallel but longer-term fall in coups d’état in the region—to a significant increase in international initiatives directed towards stopping ongoing political violence and preventing it from restarting. Third, it updates the global trend data on armed conflicts, battle-deaths, coups d’état, and human rights abuses that were reported in the Human Security Report 2005 and Human Security Brief 2006. It finds that there has been little net change in recent years in the number of conflicts in which a government is one of the warring parties, but that other forms of political violence, including communal conflicts, have declined.

http://www.humansecuritybrief.info/HSRP_Brief_2007.pdf