Armed conflict declined sharply after the Cold War. By 2001, a rigorous dataset and the world's leading peace research institutions agreed: war was in retreat. The evidence, at the time, was genuinely compelling.
Battle-Related Deaths, 1989–2005 — The Declining Trend
Key Insight: Deaths fell from a post-Cold War high of 80,297 in 1990 to just 12,322 by 2005 — a 85% reduction. The spike in 1999–2000 (Eritrea–Ethiopia war) was treated as an anomaly in a broader downward trend. The Human Security Report 2005 used this data to conclude: armed conflict had declined by 40% since the early 1990s.
Conflict Type Breakdown (1946–2001)
Key Insight: 72.8% of post-war conflicts were internal. Traditional interstate wars — the kind that mobilised millions — accounted for just 5.4% of conflict-years. The post-Cold War era appeared to be draining the interstate category toward zero.
Intensity Distribution (1946–2001)
Key Insight: 75% of conflicts remained "minor" (25–999 deaths/year). Full-scale wars (1,000+ deaths/year) were declining as a share of the total. The Uppsala framework captured both — unlike the Correlates of War threshold, which would have missed three-quarters of this violence entirely.