Armed Conflict Survey 2021

The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS)

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000545586
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Armed Conflict Survey is the annual review of the political, military and humanitarian dimensions of all active conflicts from the International Institute for Strategic Studies. It offers in-depth analysis of the drivers, dynamics and outlook of 34 current armed conflicts along with detailed information on conflict parties and more than 60 full-colour maps and infographics. The Armed Conflict Survey is an essential resource for those involved in security, foreign and humanitarian policymaking, and an indispensable handbook for anyone conducting serious analysis of armed conflict.

Key features

· Essays on global trends in armed conflict, with a focus on the changing nature of third-party intervention, the long aftermath of armed conflicts, and economic migration and forced displacement in a COVID-19 world.

· Overviews of key events and political and military developments from January 2020–February 2021 for each conflict.

· Strategic analysis of national and regional drivers and conflict outlooks.

· Regional analyses with unique insights into the geopolitical and geo-economic threads linking conflicts across regions and globally.

· Expanded information on conflict parties.

· The Armed Conflict Global Relevance Indicator (ACGRI), an IISS proprietary indicator that combines measures of incidence and human impact with geopolitical impact to assess the global salience of armed conflicts.

· Analysis of the humanitarian, social and economic impact of conflicts.

· Conflict-specific trends, strategic implications and prospects for peace.

· More than 60 full-colour maps, tables and infographics highlighting key conflict developments and data.

· Key statistics on violent events, fatalities, military power, geopolitical salience, refugees and internally displaced persons.

· The 2021 Chart of Armed Conflict, presenting information on conflict start dates, typologies and relevant refugee flows, as well as providing a visual overview of each conflict's geopolitical relevance, looking at 2020 UN Security Council resolutions, multilateral missions and the involvement of third-party countries.

CONFLICT REPORTS

An Afar Special Forces fighter among the debris of houses damaged in the village of Bisober, Tigray Region, Ethiopia

1 Americas

Regional Analysis

Conflict Reports

Mexico

Colombia

Brazil

Conflict Summaries

El Salvador

Honduras

People forced to abandon their homes in the San Pedro Sula Valley due to floods in the aftermath of Hurricane Eta

Overview

The Americas’ conflict landscape is characterised by grey zones between organised crime and political violence. Multiple criminal groups fight each other and the government, largely driven by competition over lucrative illicit economies, while increasingly challenging the state’s territorial control and monopoly on the use of force. They try, and often succeed, to infiltrate state institutions and influence politics, using intimidation and violence but also electoral votes they control as bargaining chips. In some cases, they also play a quasi-state role, providing goods and services and ensuring basic governance in their areas of control. This was in full display during the coronavirus pandemic, with gangs across the region enforcing (or imposing) lockdown measures, distributing essential goods and personal protective equipment, and fixing prices of critical goods. In sum, although the main motivations of conflict are not ideological (with the exception of Colombia and to a lesser extent Brazil), violence is often used for political purposes and to fundamentally undermine public security and ultimately the state’s authority.¹

Conflict is particularly ripe along the transnational drugs routes that stretches from Colombia, South America’s coca cultivation and production powerhouse, to the main markets in the United States (through Central America and Mexico), Brazil and (through the latter) Europe. This means that policies in destination markets (especially in the US) directly influence the evolution of conflict. In particular, hardline drug policies promoted by the US and espoused by most Latin American countries have failed to curb illicit-drugs economies, thereby perpetuating violence.² The nexus between violence, migration and regional instability also raises the global importance of Latin American conflicts despite their inherently internal nature, without any formal intervention by external powers.

Sources: IISS; Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), www.acleddata.com; El Salvador, Ministry of Justice and Public Security; Honduras, Office of Security of the Secretary of State; General Management of the National Police of Honduras; Mexico, Secretariat of Security and Civilian Protection; United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs; UN Office on Drugs and Crime; Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN

Root causes of conflict include the many inequalities (of income, land ownership, access to basic services, race, geography to name a few) that permeate the region’s societies and development models, compounded by institutional fragilities and governance flaws. The coronavirus pandemic’s devastating health, human and economic toll on the region simultaneously exacerbated social tensions and socio-economic inequalities while reinforcing gangs’ legitimacy and further weakening government effectiveness.³ This is likely to aggravate violence and instability in the medium term.

Regional Trends

Continued violence

Conflict continued unabated in 2020 and early 2021, despite some initial coronavirus-related disruptions to the activities of criminal gangs.⁴ Homicide rates decreased notably in El Salvador, and to a lesser extent in Honduras, Colombia, Mexico and Brazil, but this was likely linked to pandemic-related mobility restrictions and other factors – including data-collection flaws as well as arrangements/truces with gangs – and not indicative of an improvement in violence trends.⁵ Indeed, the decline in homicides was concomitant to spikes of violence in areas of contestation and increases in massacres and killings by security forces across the region.

Sources: Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), www.acleddata.com; Thomas Hale et al., ‘A Global Panel Database of Pandemic Policies (Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker)’, Nature Human Behaviour, vol. 5, no. 4, April 2021, pp. 529–38

Figure 1: Number of fatalities from violent events per 100,000 people, January 2020–February 2021

Economic and social upheaval

The pandemic, coupled with hurricanes Eta and Iota which brought havoc in Central America in November 2020, substantially aggravated underlying root causes of violence in the region.⁶ Despite most Latin American countries adopting emergency cash transfers to the most vulnerable segments of their populations, poverty rates are estimated to have increased from 30.5% of the regional population to 33.7% in 2019–20, with an additional 22 million people falling into poverty, the worst levels since 2008 (or since 2009 in the case of extreme poverty).⁷ This further undid progress to reduce inequalities, as shown by an estimated 3% increase of the regional Gini index.⁸ Employment indicators also worsened, both in terms of unemployment numbers and quality of jobs. Informal workers (including migrants) and youth were among the most affected, boosting the size of the recruitment pool for criminal organisations. Border closures between countries in the region (and with the US) temporarily halted migration, removing a traditional escape valve for countries (notably in Central America) in times of economic hardship.

State inefficiency and growing politicisation of criminal groups

Governments, whose resources and efficiency were significantly stretched by the multiple emergencies, proved increasingly incapable of performing their basic functions. Criminal groups skilfully leveraged the resulting governance gaps to expand and reinforce their territorial control while gaining legitimacy with local populations by providing basic services and essential goods during lockdowns. This reinforced pre-existing trends of politicisation of criminal groups, whose goals to infiltrate or even replace the state became more prominent.

Regional Drivers

Political and institutional

State fragility:

Widespread governance flaws and rampant corruption in the region have historically created a conducive environment for impunity, crime and violence to thrive. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index 2020 classified most countries in the region as either flawed democracies (including Brazil, Colombia and Mexico) or hybrid regimes (including El Salvador and Honduras).⁹ Institutional limitations have also allowed criminal groups to operate freely and impose their rule in large portions of national territories. In deprived neighbourhoods in Brazil, El Salvador and Honduras, where state governance is poor, criminal gangs impose their own social rules, security measures and illegal taxation schemes. In Mexico, cartels use bribery and violence against public officials to extract favours or impunity. Meanwhile, impenetrable territories in the forest of Colombia create safe havens for coca cultivation and insurgent groups far from the state’s reach.

Economic and social

Socio-economic divides:

Violence has marked the modern history of Latin America. Land disputes embedded in strong socioeconomic divides between rural and urban areas bolstered insurgency in the 1960s. Peace agreements were eventually reached in Nicaragua (1987), El Salvador (1992), Guatemala (1996) and Colombia (early 1990s and 2016) and guerrillas demobilised, but violence soon re-ignited amid continued economic stagnation. Similar pressing social and economic issues also triggered a surge in criminality in countries hitherto unaffected by armed conflict, including Brazil and Mexico, as many in need turned to illicit economies as a source of income. Despite improvement in the last two decades, poverty levels and inequality remain very high in Latin America. By the 2010s, rapid urbanisation,¹⁰ in a context of inequality and economic deprivation, further catalysed violence.¹¹ Around 25% of the urban population in Latin America and the Caribbean is poor, and widespread informality and unemployment (especially for youth) provide the perfect terrain for criminal gangs and illicit activities to thrive.¹²

Drug-trafficking routes and territorial control:

In the late 1990s, drug production and trafficking established itself as a key root of conflict, with cer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Editor’s Introduction
• Notes on Methodology
• Global Trends
• Conflict Reports
• Data Appendix
• Index