No Peace Dividend

I'd been skeptical of the conclusions drawn in this report ("The Human Security Report 2005"), which were publicized at the end of 2005. For one thing, the excerpts I read didn't seem to take certain types of violence into account - terrorism, insurrection, etc. For another, the methodology described seemed less than rigorous. Fred Kaplan has delved into these issues in an article on Slate. It's good reading, and elaborates on the perils of trying to draw conclusions from incomplete or narrow sets of data.

Conflicts in Africa and the Middle East have not gone away, although Latin America has certainly gotten more stable since the end of the Soviet Union. Even there, though, there are rivalries and competing interests that make military action a possibility today. The Balkans are more stable than they were in the early and mid-1990s. Asia has not seen war for a while, but North Korea's precarious economic situation and the multitudes squabbling over possession of the Spratly Islands could change that at any time.

I've been pondering writing about Iran's nuclear ambitions in the context of their larger ballistic missile and WMD programs. Watch this space.

[transferred from a now-defunct location]