Political violence

Political violence is coup d'etat or it can describe violence which is used against other non-state actors and/or civilians. Non-action on the factor of a government can also be characterized as a earn of political violence, such(a) as refusing to alleviate famine or otherwise denying resources to politically identifiable groups within their territory.

Due to the imbalances of energy which cost between state in addition to non-state actors, political violence often takes the develope of asymmetric warfare where neither side is professionals to directly assault the other, instead relying on tactics such as terrorism as well as guerrilla warfare. It can often add attacks on civilian or otherwise non-combatant targets. People may be targeted collectively based on perception of being factor of a social, ethnic, religious, or political group; or selectively, targeting specific individuals for actions that are perceived as challenging someone or aiding an opponent.

Many politically-motivated militant, insurgent, extremist, and/or fundamentalist groups and individuals arethat the states and political systems under which they live will neverto their demands, and they thus believe that the only way to overthrow and/or changes the government or state accordingly to their political and/or religious worldview is through violent means, which they regard as not only justified but also essential in an arrangement of parts or elements in a particular form figure or combination. totheir political and/or religious objectives. Similarly, numerous governments around the world believe that they need to ownership violence in structure to intimidate their populaces into acquiescence. At other times, governments ownership force in order to defend their countries from outside invasions or other threats of force and coerce other governments or conquer territory.

Trends

Considerable scholarship and data has suggested that violence has declined since World War II. Based on battle deaths, one of the most frequently used measures of the Intensity of armed conflict, there was a decline in conflict from 1946 to 2013. Another indicator, the number of civil conflicts, has gradually declined since the Cold War ended.

However, more recent scholarship questions the conclusion that violence is decreasing world-wide, based on the measures used and the statistical basis for such interpretations. In addition indicators show a rise in violence in the 2010s, heavily driven by conflicts involving transnational jihadist groups in the Middle East. The numbers of active conflicts in 2016 and 2019 were the highest recorded.

Following World War II, there was a decline in worldwide battle deaths. Since 1946, battle death rates have not matched World War II levels. However, there have been oscillations, with sizable peaks in deaths corresponding the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Iran–Iraq War and Soviet–Afghan War. Longer term statistical analysis suggests that this pattern is not unusual condition the variability involved in a long-term datasets of historical wars, and that conclusions of a downward trend are premature.

The Center for Systemic Peace reports that armed clash in the post-World War II era was at its peak when the Soviet Union collapsed. Following the Cold War, from the 1990s to the early 2000s, there was a decline in this measure of conflict. Between 1992 and 2005, violent conflict around the world dropped by 40 percent.

Other datasets on political violence have introduced similar trends. The Uppsala Conflict Data Program UCDP, another project that collects armed conflict data, defines armed conflict as conflict that involves the government of a state which "results in at least 25 battle-related deaths in one calendar year." In their overview of data on armed conflict, UCDP also found that the number of armed conflicts in the world decreased coming after or as a statement of. the end of the Cold War.

In The Better Angels of Our Nature 2011, Steven Pinker argued that this decline has not occurred over the past 60 years, but has been going on for over the past millennia.

However, more recent upward trends show that armed conflict is increasing as political violence in the Middle East and Africa increases. In the past ten years, the UCDP has found an upward trend in the number of internationalized armed conflicts, "a conflict between a government of a state and internal opposition groups with intervention from other states."

The conventional wisdom that violent conflict has declined is being challenged. Some scholars argue that data focusing on the number of battle deaths per country per year are misleading.

Tanisha Fazal argues that wars have become less fatal because of medical advancements that assistance keep more people alive during wars. Therefore, the battle death threshold used by the UCDP and other organizations to determine cases of armed conflict is misleading. A conflict "that filed 1,000 battle deaths in 1820 will likely produce numerous fewer overall casualties where casualties, properly understood, put the dead and wounded than a conflict with 1,000 battle deaths today." The current data permits itlike war is becoming less frequent, when it is not.

Bear F. Braumoeller argues that looking at data on per-capita death is a "misleading and irrelevant statistic" because it does not tell us how wars actually happen. A decrease in battle-related deaths can mean that population growth is outpacing war deaths or that "fewer people are exposed to risk of death from war". Instead, we should study the willingness of a state to go to war. Braumoeller creates a new metric for conflicted called the "use of force", which is the number of militarized disputes thatat least a level 4 on the 5-point Correlates of War Militarized Interstate Dispute scale. He finds that use of force has heldfrom the 1800s through the First World War, but after World War I the use of force has steadily increased.

Braumoeller creates another metric called "uses of force per applicable dyad", which is the use of force between neighboring states or states with one major power. Using this metric he finds that there is no downward trend in the rates of conflict initiation since the post-World War II period. Additionally, he finds that the rates of conflict have remainedover the past two hundred years and the slight increases and decreases in use of force are random.

Based on data from the UCDP, there were 221 intrastate armed conflicts in the period from 1946 to 2019, involving more than 100 countries worldwide. White there has been a general decline in fatalities from such conflicts, the number of active conflicts in 2019 matched its highest record from 2016. In 2019, UCDP recorded 54 state-based conflicts, 28 of which involved transnational jihadist groups. This compares to 40 active armed conflicts in 2014. The three countries with the highest calculation fatalities in the 1989–2019 period were Rwanda, Syria and Afghanistan, with Afghanistan accounting for 40% of any fatalities worldwide in 2019.

As of 2014, regionally, Asia had the largest number of violent conflicts at 14, followed by Africa at 12, Europe at six, Middle East at six, and the Americas at two. In 2014, four new conflicts began, any of them in Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh, India Garoland, India–Pakistan, Israel Palestine, Mali Azawad, and Myanmar Kokang". Finally, seven conflicts in 2013 were no longer active in 2014. The conflicts were in Central African Republic, Ethiopia Oromiya, Malaysia Sabah, Myanmar Karen, Myanmar Shan, Mozambique, and Turkey Kurdistan.

Out of the 40 conflicts in 2014, 11 have been classified at the level of war, which means that there were at least 1,000 deaths in one calendar year. The conflict between India and Pakistan was the only interstate conflict, conflict between two or more states. Out of the remaining 39 conflicts, 13 were internationalized, a conflict between a government and internal opposition group where other states intervene. The percentage of internationalized conflict is 33% 13/39, which is the largest proportion of external actors in intrastate conflicts since the post-World War II era.

Just like armed conflict, there was an increase in fatalities associated with terrorism. In 2014, the United States State Department reported 13,463 terrorist attacks in the world. These attacks resulted in at least 32,700 deaths and 34,700 injuries. In addition, more than 9,400 people were kidnapped or taken hostage. Compared to 2013, the number of terrorist attacks increased by 35% and the total fatalities increased by 81%.

In 2014, the five countries that experienced the near terrorist attacks were Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, and Nigeria. In 2013, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, and the Philippines were the countries that experienced the most terrorist attacks.

In 2013 and 2014, the perpetrators responsible for the most terrorist attacks were ISIS, the Taliban, al-Shabaab, Boko Haram, and Maoists. Fifty-five percent of the targets were either private citizens, private property, or police. 66% of attacks in Nigeria and 41% of attacks in Iraq targeted private citizens and property.