VII

The genesis of the Human Security Report dates back to

the end of the 1990s when I was working as Director of

the Strategic Planning Unit in UN Secretary-General Kofi

Annan’s Executive Office.

Shortly after arriving in New York I was surprised to

find that the UN had no way of determining whether wars,

mass slaughters of civilians or core human rights abuses

were increasing or decreasing around the world.

The fact that there has been a dramatic global decline

in political violence since the end of the Cold War was,

even then, evident to many conflict researchers. But it had

gone largely unnoticed by officials and the public alike—

and even some scholars working in the field.

In a sense this wasn’t surprising. The global media gave

front-page coverage to new wars, but mostly ignored the

larger number of existing conflicts that quietly ended. And

neither the UN nor any other international organisation

collected data on wars, genocides, terrorism and violent

abuses of human rights. This is still the case more than

five years later.

Without access to reliable data on global and regional

trends in political violence, the UN, regional organisa-

tions and donor governments had no way of determining

whether in general their conflict prevention, peacebuilding

or human rights promotion policies were effective.

Security issues are extremely sensitive for member

states of the UN and all attempts to create a substantial

P R E F A C E

in-house research capacity in the Secretariat that could

collate data and examine sensitive security issues have

been frustrated.

Fortunately, the scholarly community has produced

a wealth of relevant data that to a degree make up for

the absence of official statistics. Although much of this

material is highly technical and inaccessible to non-

specialists, it has provided a solid base for the Human

Security Report 2005.

The challenge has been to make sense of the mass of

often contested data and analysis available in the research

community around the world and to commission new ma-

terial where necessary. Last but not least, the findings had

to be integrated into a comprehensive package that was

accessible to policymakers and other non-specialists.

This task has proven far more time-consuming than

any of us could have imagined.

We owe our funders—the governments of Canada,

Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom—

a deep debt of gratitude for their patience.

Finally, we have almost certainly missed some critical

new findings that would throw further light on the chang-

es that this report chronicles. We hope that where this is

the case readers will let us know so new findings can be

included in future volumes.

Andrew Mack

Director

Human Security Centre

Liu Institute for Global Issues

University of British Columbia

June 2005