> Human costs of war declining: study

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Andrew Mack, 604.803.3548 (cell), Note: he is in New York and returns Friday
Stuart Colcleugh, PAMR, 778.782.3210

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Wartime mortality—from disease and malnutrition as well as war-inflicted injuries—is decreasing in most of today’s armed conflicts according to a new study by Simon Fraser University’s Human Security Report Project (HSRP).

The Shrinking Costs of War also disputes claims of enormous death tolls in Iraq, Darfur and Democratic Republic of the Congo, citing serious errors in methodology used to generate statistics.

Overall, the study says war death rates have been driven downwards by:

• A 70-per-cent decline in high-intensity conflicts since the end of the Cold War;
• More than 30 years of effective peacetime health interventions such as childhood immunization; and
• A dramatic increase in the level and effectiveness of humanitarian assistance to people in war zones.

“No one, of course, is suggesting that war is good for people’s health,” says HSRP director Andrew Mack. “But the reality is that the death toll in most of today’s wars is too small to reverse the steady decline in peacetime mortality that developing countries have been experiencing for more than 30 years.”

The study cites the changing nature of war as the most important driver of the dramatic decline in war-related deaths. In particular, it notes a shift from large conventional wars fought with heavy weapons during the Cold War to “low intensity insurgencies” in the past two decades fought mostly by small, lightly armed rebel groups seeking to avoid major battles.

The cumulative effect of all of these changes has been profound, says Mack. “The average war in the new millennium generates 90-per-cent fewer battle deaths than did the average war in the 1950s.”

The Shrinking Costs of War is available at http://www.hsrgroup.org/.

The HSRP is a project of SFU’s School for International Studies.

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