The 2007 Human Security Brief was released this morning by the School for International Studies at SFU in Vancouver.

Challenging the expert consensus that the threat of global terrorism is increasing, the Human Security Brief 2007 reveals a sharp net decline in the incidence of terrorist violence around the world.

Fatalities from terrorism have declined by some 40 percent, while the loose-knit terror network associated with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda has suffered a dramatic collapse in popular support throughout the Muslim world.

The Brief also describes and analyses the extraordinary, but largely unnoticed, positive change in sub-Saharan Africa’s security landscape. The number of conflicts being waged in the region more than halved between 1999 and 2006; the combat toll dropped by 98 percent.

Finally, the Brief updates the findings of the 2005 Human Security Report, and demonstrates that the decline in the total number of armed conflicts and combat deaths around the world has continued. The number of military coups has also continued decline, as have the number of campaigns of deadly violence waged against civilians.

It’s a strong report, worth reading. One of the best features is that they financed collection of new data on non-state armed conflicts as well as “one-sided” acts of violence (e.g. state-sponsored massacres).

The big civil war questions they tackle: where has all the war gone? And why? The answer seems to be increased international intervention, but I’m not so sure.

My suspicion is that the end of the Cold War destabilized client states, and the war that followed over the next decade was one way nations reached a new political equilibrium (of sorts). Unfortunately this is just the sort of hypothesis it’s almost impossible to test using conventional statistical tools, so it does not receive much attention.

My only real quibble with the report, however, is the emphasis on civil war outbreak in ‘anocracies’. What-cracies, you ask? Anocracy is the unfortunate name political scientists have given to almost-democracies. Famous civil conflict studies find that war is associated with states in this nether-region, rather than in straight democracies or dictatorships.

The problem: turns out that the people who coded the anocracy variable used conflict and violence in their definition. So the association with conflict is purely an artifact of coding. That clever discovery comes from my colleague Jim Vreeland (here) who investigates and unpacks the data–an excellent example of the kind of rigor and data sleuthing that the civil war literature too seldom displays.

The Full Human Security Brief is here.