Conflict Ideas Forum

Conflict deaths are decreasing as a result of fewer civil wars and inter-state wars. However, a quarter of the world’s population still lives in the shadows of different types of organised violence, including armed insurgencies, terrorism and violent extremism, gang-violence and violence associated with organised crime. This suggests that the constituents, landscapes, cycles and dynamics of pervasive violence have changed.

Our second Conflict Ideas Forum was on the topic of large-scale violent conflict that neither fits formal and familiar definitions of "armed conflict", nor does it fit into the mandates of international institutions.

On 10th December we held our first Conflict Ideas Forum at the Royal Commonwealth Society in London.

In the first ten years after the EU decided at its 2001 Gothenburg summit to have a policy on conflict prevention, the European Commission spent €7.7 billion on what we would now call peacebuilding, about 10 per cent of its total spending on external aid. That made it the world’s biggest peacebuilding spender.

Local/Global dynamics

Mana Farooghi

Programme Officer

Department of Emerging Programmes