An alarming picture
posted: 2023-12-17| by: Jon Brunberg

The latest figures from Uppsala Conflict Data Program, UCDP, paints a picture that should be cause for alarm: the number of armed conflict in the world has not been this high in decades. In 2022 UCDP recorded 187 active armed conflicts in three main categories: state-based, non-state and one-sided violence. It's the highest figure since they first started to publish records in all three categories in 1989. Most remarkably the number of state-based conflicts has soared, from 31 active conflicts in 2010 to 56 in 2022.

Even more alarming is the fact that the number of fatalities in armed conflicts are at a record high. Never since the fall of the Soviet Union has so many died because of war, except only for the horrific exception of the Rwandan Genocide of 1994.

For this project I maintain a list of wars since 1900 based on data from Correlates of War, PRIO and UCDP. It was made to give a global overview of all the wars in the world based on the best academic research available through open sources. In theses troubling times it seems appropriate to update it with the most recent data. As this is a nonprofit project this usually takes a couple of months. You are warmly welcome to follow the process at war-memorial.net and the project's facebook page.

Jon Brunberg
Stockholm 17 december 2023

Chart: UCDP, fatalities by types of violence 1989-2022. Based on data from UCDP 23.1. Graph from https://ucdp.uu.se/downloads/charts/. Source: Davies, Shawn, Therese Pettersson & Magnus Öberg (2023). Organized violence 1989-2022 and the return of conflicts between states?. Journal of Peace Research (Forthcoming).