Human Security Brief 2007 Shows Decline in Terrorism

The Human Security Report Project research team at Simon Fraser University’s School for International Studies in Vancouver released its Human Security Brief 2007 earlier this week.

"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 has taken place since the end of the 1990s. 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."

The Human Security Report Project’s mission is to undertake research on global and regional trends in political violence. It manages the Human Security Gateway, an online database of human security resources.

It is funded by the governments of Canada, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

For analysis of the 2007 Brief, see the BBC news story Is global terror threat falling?