Surveys claim the world is a much safer place

But, according to a raft of studies, surveys and reports, our planet is, in fact, enjoying one of its most peaceful periods in recent history, with the number of armed conflicts, battlefield deaths and weapons sales at their lowest for decades.

The events of 11 September, 2001, were the most devastating of a series of terror attacks that have left thousands dead over the past three years and prompted wars in Afghanistan and, some might argue, Iraq.

But, despite fears that the United States-led coalition to oust Saddam Hussein without United Nations approval has heralded the end of international co-operation, multi-lateral peacekeeping appears to be flourishing.

According to the respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), 14 peacekeeping missions were mounted last year, the highest in a single year since the Cold War. "Not only are the numbers [of wars] declining, but the intensity is declining," said Monty Marshall, the founder of a programme at the University of Maryland in the US examining political violence.

"International engagement is blossoming. There’s been an enormous amount of activity to try to end these conflicts."

A study from the Congressional Research Service (CRS) in Washington appears to confirm the overall picture of the planet creeping towards a more peaceful existence, with the value of worldwide arms sales falling in 2003 for the third year in a row.

The CRS report found the value of global weapons transfer agreements last year was 14.3 billion - a sharp decline from 2000, when it stood at 22.8 billion.

Conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and last week’s school siege by Chechen separatists in Beslan, have kept war in the headlines, but the reports from SIPRI and the Canadian peace group Project Ploughshares show that, although the number of conflicts peaked in the 1990s when the collapse of the Soviet Union fuelled nationalist and separatist battles, the amount of bloodshed is on the decline.

The Stockholm institute details 19 major violent conflicts in 2003 - down from 33 in 1991 - in a report to be released later this month. It defines a continuing armed conflict as one which claims 1,000 or more battle-related deaths in a year.

Project Ploughshares, which defines an armed conflict as one that results in 1,000 or more deaths cumulatively, found 36 conflicts last year - down from a peak of 44 in 1995.

A further report from the Human Security Centre at the University of British Columbia in Canada includes a conservative estimate that 15,000 people were killed in war in 2002, rising to 20,000 last year due to the conflict in Iraq.

These estimates are a far cry from the 1990s, when annual war deaths ranged from 40,000 to 100,000, inflated by major conflicts in Zaire and southern Sudan, and they come nowhere near the post-Second World War peak of 700,000 in 1951.

Some experts have sounded a note of caution, warning that the collective reports do not tell the whole story of the numbers of civilians killed away from the battlefield, through devices such as landmines.

In addition, they fail to include civilians who starve or die of war-related illness, and do not factor in fatalities caused by suicide bombings, which are increasingly being used by Islamic terrorists.

Furthermore, a defence expert, Tim Ripley, said western forces were, for the first time, heavily involved in war zones in the Third World.

"This exercise is fraught with dangers in that it is extremely difficult to get any realistic casualty figures for any war," he said.

"Apart from the British and American casualties, no-one has any definitive figures for how many Iraqis were killed and injured, and the consequences of unexploded bombs and landmines will go on for a long time.

"What is noticeable, for the first time since the 1970s, with the exception of the Iraq war in 1991, is that, while the US and NATO countries kept out of Third World wars, now they are in there with a vengeance.

"Until the war on terror, western forces, apart from in the Gulf war, were kept out or were just peacekeepers.

"To a certain extent, it is the same old, same old in Africa, with wars that come and go. If you live in the Congo or Sudan, it’s not much better, is it?

"The end of the Cold War seemed to bring about the end of the threat of annihilation to the West, but, in the 21st century, the West is very much involved in other people’s conflicts. To say the world is a safer place - probably not."

The Human Security Centre’s figures do not include deaths from war-induced starvation and disease, nor do they count ethnic battles not involving rival states, such as the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. The break-up of the Soviet Union spawned a series of nationalist wars and civil conflicts when Moscow was no longer there to maintain peace between rival ethnic and political groups.

"The decline over the past decade measures the move away from that unusual period," Ernie Regehr, the director of Project Ploughshares, said.

On the other hand, the end of the Cold War has meant the US and Soviet Union were no longer supporting "proxy wars" in countries such as Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Cambodia.

According to Andrew Mack, the director of the Human Security Centre, the UN and regional peacekeeping bodies are now successfully preventing conflicts.

"The end of the Cold War liberated the UN to do what its founders originally intended, and more," Mr Mack said.

Last year, the SIPRI report says, 14 multilateral missions took place in places such as the Ivory Coast and Solomon Islands.

Renata Dwan, who heads the Stockholm institute’s programme on armed conflict and conflict management, said recent history showed that "conflicts tend not to end without some form of intervention from outside".

Despite the sidelining of the UN by Washington last year, when President George Bush led a coalition into Iraq without Security Council approval, it still deployed 38,500 military peacekeepers in 2003 - three times as many as in 1999.

The SIPRI report concludes that the UN was, arguably, in a stronger position than at any time in recent years.

Mirroring this move from war to peace has been a marked slump in global arms sales agreements, although the industry is targeting developing nations.

Last year, arms transfer agreements to developing countries accounted for 53.6 per cent of all arms transactions, worth 7.6 billion.

That was a notable decrease from the 9.7 billion total in 2002.

Of those arms deals with developing countries, the US signed deals for more than 3.4 billion, or about 45.4 per cent, while Russia signed for 2.2 billion, or 23.4 per cent, of the sales in 2003.

"The developing world continues to be the primary focus of foreign arms sales activity by conventional weapons suppliers," Richard Grimmett, a specialist in national defence at the CRS, reported in his introduction to its paper.

The study found "numerous developing nations have reduced their weapons purchases primarily due to their lack of sufficient funds to pay for such weaponry".

The report goes on: "Even those prospective arms purchasers in the developing world with significant financial assets have exercised restraint and caution before embarking upon new and costly weapons procurement endeavours."

Due to "the unsettled state of the global economy", a number of developing nations had decided to upgrade their existing weapons rather than buy new weapons systems, the study finds.

However, Ian Prichard, a research co-ordinator at the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, said the CRS report on actual deliveries of arms - as opposed to arms agreements - showed no real downwards trend was occurring.

In 1998, arms deliveries were worth 28.6 billion, in 2000 they totalled 18.5 billion, in 2002 they were 22.7 billion and last year 16 billion.

Mr Prichard told The Scotsman: "The reports talk about battlefield-related deaths, but in wars most people don’t die in the battles.

"This is part of the picture, but it doesn’t include internal repression and human rights abuses. Nor does the Ploughshares figure include unopposed massacres, such as in Rwanda.

"If the number of conflicts is going down, we would welcome that, but as to whether the world is a safer place, there are so many more aspects to it than that."