Blog post archive

Thursday, 31 Oct 2024
473 million Children Live in Conflict Zones

The world is suffering from escalating levels of conflict. The Civil war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the bombing of Gaza have all significantly contributed to dramatic increase in battle deaths in recent years. Moreover, 2023 witnessed the highest number of state-based conflicts – 59 ...

Wednesday, 9 Oct 2024
Can We Award a Prize for Peace in a World Full of War?

On Friday 11 October, we will find out the winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. The announcement will take place against the background of full-scale wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, as well as a record number of other conflicts around the world. Could the Nobel Committee decide ...

Thursday, 14 Dec 2023
More and More Children at Risk of Conflict

News reporting from around the world constantly and painfully reminds us about the heavy toll paid by children in current conflicts, such as in Ethiopia, Ukraine, and Gaza. In addition to being directly exposed to grave violations such as killing and maiming, recruitment by armed groups, sexual violence, abduction, attacks ...

Friday, 3 Feb 2023
Bias in Economic Models Ignores the Impact of War in Poor Nations

New research shows that existing economic forecasting models vastly underestimate the impact of conflict on marginalized countries. National income for war-torn nations like Afghanistan, Niger and Yemen could be up to 50 to 70 per cent lower than existing estimates by the end of the century. When considering what our ...

Friday, 30 Dec 2022
The Results of a Prediction Competition Suggest the Fog of War Can Be Partially Lifted

We may never be able to eradicate political violence like what is now seen in Ethiopia, or in the deaths and damage wrought around the Colombo region in Sri Lanka. As Plato noted, “Only the dead have seen the end of war”. But a more realistic goal may be within ...

Wednesday, 30 Nov 2022
Fewer Children Affected by Conflict, but Conflict Intensity Is on the Rise

Today Save the Children launches its new report Stop the War on Children: The Forgotten Ones. The report is based on PRIO’s sixth annual mapping of children in armed conflict covering the period 1990-2021. In 2021 our estimates suggest that 449 million children, or more than 1 out of 6 ...

Thursday, 18 Aug 2022
2021 – A Bad Year for World Peace

After a declining trend since 2014 for the number of people killed in armed conflict, approximately 84,000 people died last year. Since 2014, we have seen a global declining trend for the number of people killed in armed conflict, but in 2021 this trend experienced a sharp reversal. New figures ...

Monday, 30 May 2022
Staying Rather Than Leaving? Displacement and Conflict-Exposure in Ukraine

The Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February has led to rapid and large-scale displacement. What do we know about the dynamics of conflict and mobility in Ukraine, and how does conflict exposure impact people’s decisions to stay or to go? Drawing on new survey data from Ukraine, we shed ...

Monday, 11 Apr 2022
Why Widespread Sexual Violence Is Likely in Ukraine

Sexual violence has not received much attention in the coverage of the war in Ukraine. However, reports of cases of sexual violence by Russian or pro-Russian soldiers are just starting to appear. Some human rights organizations in Ukraine have already warned about this risk. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Kuleba recently claimed ...

Thursday, 24 Feb 2022
How Did Europe Get into This Predicament? We Must Look in Our Own Backyard

It’s easy to condemn the opposing party in a polarized situation. But it’s more difficult to exercise self-criticism. It’s easy to condemn the opposing party in a polarized situation. Particularly when there are good reasons for such condemnation, as in the current situation. It’s easy to state that Russia’s lust ...

Monday, 14 Feb 2022
What Happens to Childhood Vaccine Rates in Conflict Zones? This Analysis Found Some Surprises

We examined more than 200,000 records in 15 African countries. As more coronavirus vaccines begin to reach the developing world, global health authorities are pointing out the need for other vaccines as well. UNICEF recently launched a record $9.4 billion emergency appeal to help more than 327 million people — including 177 million children — affected ...

Wednesday, 1 Dec 2021
The New Pattern of Conflict in Myanmar

A new conflict pattern has appeared in Myanmar. Amidst a spiraling economic, social and health crisis, armed fighting is no longer confined to ethnic minority areas but has cropped up in cities and regions where the ethnic Bamar are in majority. They see themselves as pursuing a nation-wide resistance. Preventive ...

Tuesday, 30 Nov 2021
1 in 8 Children Are at Risk of Being Recruited by Armed Actors

The recruitment and use of children as soldiers is one of the United Nations Security Council’s ‘six grave violations’ against children in times of war, as well as one of the most significant consequences of armed conflict in terms of children’s wellbeing. On 30 November, Save the Children launched its ...

Wednesday, 30 Jun 2021
Do Cease-Fires in Syria Work? We Checked the Data.

Our research looks at 10 years of truces in Syria. A missile attack last weekend in northern Syria left a hospital in ruins and further casualties in a residential area. But these types of attacks have become less common in Syria. Although this civil war remains among the most devastating ...

Thursday, 4 Feb 2021
Can We Predict Civil War?

Since 2010, almost 700,000 people have been killed as the direct result of warfare. But war kills and injures far more people than those who die directly on the battlefield. War destroys health systems, increases infant mortality, reduces life expectancy, increases poverty, and deprives children of education. If we could ...

Wednesday, 30 Dec 2020
Which Countries Win (and Lose) When We Add Democracy to the Human Development Index?

The UNDP’s Human Development Index (HDI) is a major achievement. It has focused the world’s attention on the human aspects of development, highlighting and featuring not just economic gains but also schooling and education and life expectancy. In this, it was a hugely important corrective for a development community that ...

Tuesday, 24 Nov 2020
Protests, Elections, and Ethnic Tensions in West Africa: What are the Driving Forces?

As ongoing post-electoral violence across West-Africa continues, especially in countries such as Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire, the region is forced to urgently address the implications of long-term economic decline and poor governance systems. What are the key driving forces for the current troubling political atmosphere? Post-election Violence: Guinea  and Côte ...

Thursday, 5 Nov 2020
Whoever Wins the American Presidential Election, Democracy is Losing

The nation’s frenzied attention on the presidential election comes amid the backdrop of the crucial issues of the COVID-19 pandemic, police violence, racial protest, militia threats, the Supreme Court and active attempts at voter suppression. Supporters of both presidential candidates see the other side’s win as apocalyptic. Our recent research ...

Thursday, 27 Aug 2020
Mali’s Coup Leaves a Leadership Vacuum: Can the country rebuild stronger?

In the early morning hours of Wednesday 19 August, the Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta (IBK) appeared on national TV to resign after a military junta had arrested him, the prime minister and several other members of the administration the day before. Motivated by dissatisfaction of military salaries and political ...

Monday, 9 Mar 2020
PRIO Has the Leading Experts on Protests

How does a country’s security apparatus react to a protest movement? And what happens in the aftermath of successful protests? PRIO is conducting three major research projects about protest movements, securing its position as an international leader in this field. In 2019, the world experienced a surge of non-violent protest ...

Friday, 6 Mar 2020
Improved Data to Assist in the Prevention and Management of Conflicts

Today, the Praia City Group on Governance Statistics is launching its Handbook on Governance Statistics. The Praia Handbook on Governance Statistics provides improved data that can assist in the prevention and management of conflicts. What is the Handbook about? the … handbook is in itself nothing less than a historical ...

Wednesday, 14 Aug 2019
The First Steps in the PRIO-Uppsala Connection: Peter Wallensteen Interviewed by Siri Aas Rustad

Peter Wallensteen, interviewed by Siri Aas Rustad PRIO was the engine of our Nordic peace research network. To ‘go to PRIO’ meant to be updated on the state of the art, to find out what was going on. The ideas generated could then be taken back home and used to ...

Friday, 24 May 2019
Will There Be Peace in Westeros?

In my last Game of Thrones blog post I looked into whether there were any similarities between the War of the Five Kings and modern war in the real world. I found a surprisingly large number of similarities. Now that we have seen the end GoT, and we know who ...

Tuesday, 18 Dec 2018
The Clash of Guns and Swords: Game of Thrones and Reality

Are there any similarities between the bloody war in Game of Thrones (GoT) and modern conflicts? The battle fields are certainly quite different, and dragons have very little to do with today’s conflicts (although they may allude to weapons of mass destruction). However, if we look beyond the fighting and ...

Friday, 5 Oct 2018
Nobel Peace Prize to Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad

The choice to award the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize to Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad is both timely and wise. The two Nobel laureates embody different dimensions of conflict-related sexual violence. Further, the prize comes at a time when we mark the one-year anniversary of the #metoo movement, when trust ...

Tuesday, 14 Aug 2018
Game of Thrones – the Middle Ages and Today

Every generation has its own concept of the Middle Ages. Game of Thrones is a fantasy drama, but it also reflects the present, viewed through the prism of the Middle Ages. From Middle-earth to Westeros Many young people today picture our distant past in a way that is strongly influenced ...

Wednesday, 1 Aug 2018
Producing Reliable Data for SDG 16: The Case of Conflict Data

In 2015, the United Nations stated unequivocally in the last progress report for the Millennium Development Goals that “conflict remains the largest obstacle to development”. Yet, reducing conflict and violence in the world was never a target in and of itself under the MDGs. This changed with the inclusion of Goal 16 ...

Monday, 16 Jul 2018
U.N. Peacekeeping Really Can Be Effective. Here’s How We Tabulated This

Syria’s seven years of conflict have had devastating consequences, with hundreds of thousands of people dead and more than 4 million refugees. Would the story be different if the United Nations Security Council had managed to come to an agreement and deployed a peacekeeping operation (PKO) early in the conflict? ...

Monday, 25 Jun 2018
Fewer Lives Being Lost in Conflicts

In 2017, approximately 90,000 people died as the direct result of armed conflict. This figure is down for the third year in a row, and is now 31 percent lower than in 2014. Nearly a third of all conflicts – and four of the 10 most serious wars worldwide – ...

Friday, 22 Jun 2018
New Education Policy in Burundi Could Halve Teenage Pregnancy

As of 2014, the Burundi government has pledged that children can continue their basic schooling until grade 9. The fertility impact of this new schooling policy is potentially strong. However, there are three important elements in this story that are less well understood: what will be the magnitude of this ...