Human Security Report Project

The Human Security Report Project (HSRP) is a Peace and Conflict Studies research group. Based at Canada's Simon Fraser University's School for International Studies at Harbour Centre in Vancouver, British Columbia, the Project is mandated to make accessible to a non-academic audience the causes and consequences of global and regional trends in political violence. It was formerly based at the University of British Columbia's Liu Institute for Global Issues in the Human Security Centre.

Publications and Services
The Project is known primarily for the Human Security Report 2005 that provided evidence that according to their data and definitions, there was a large decline in the number of wars, genocides and human rights abuse since roughly the middle of the 1990s.

Subsequently, the Project published the Human Security Brief 2006 that updated the core global trend data from the 2005 Report and the Human Security Brief 2007. The 2007 Brief demonstrated that there had been a sharp decline in the incidence of terrorist violence (measured in terms of numbers of fatalities) around the world. If fatalities from political violence against civilians perpetrated by non-state groups in Iraq are counted as deaths from terrorism the decline dated mid-2007. This claim was disputed in a press release from the University of Maryland's, START consortium. However, START at that time only had incident data to 2004. Moreover, the press release failed to show any errors in the Human Security Report Project's data or its interpretation. A major problem with the START project's dataset is that counts politically motivated killings of civilians in civil war by non-state actors as terrorism in some contexts, but not in others. In Iraq, for example, such killings are counted as acts of terrorism, but the very large number of comparable killings in sub-Saharan Africa's civil wars in the 1990s are not. This creates the false impression that terrorism (thus defined) was less prevalent in the past that was in fact the case. As the 2007 Brief pointed out this lack of consistency was also strikingly evident in the terrorism incidence data from the now-defunct Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism. Subsequent to the publication of the 2007 Brief the incidence of global terrorism has again increased with most of the increase being in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Further the 2007 Brief suggested positive change in sub-Saharan Africa's security landscape; the number of conflicts being waged in the region more than halved between 1999 and 2006.

In late October 2008, the Project published-in conjunction with the World Bank, the miniAtlas of Human Security. This publication was produced in three languages and is an "at-a-glance guide to global security issues" using a selection of maps and graphics to illustrate security trends, and is part of the World Bank's miniAtlas series.

In addition to its publications, the Project runs several free services available in a number of delivery formats:


 * Human Security Gateway.
 * Afghanistan Conflict Monitor.
 * Pakistan Conflict Monitor.
 * Human Security News.
 * Human Security Research.

Funding and Collaboration
The Project works closely with a number of the world's leading research groups in Peace and Conflict Studies including:


 * International Peace Research Institute, Oslo based in Norway.
 * the George Mason University based Center for Systemic Peace.
 * Political Terror Scale (a group based out of University of North Carolina at Asheville.
 * the Uppsala Conflict Data Program based in Sweden.

It is funded by a collection of government agencies including:


 * Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.
 * United Kingdom's Department for International Development.
 * Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs
 * Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency
 * Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs.

The HSRP is a Principal Partner of the International Relations and Security Network.

Criticism
Lack of robust conflict data remains a major problem with this type of work as it has an acknowledged tendency to under-count fatalities. As well there is an ongoing debate as to the validity of data compiling and counting methodology. In general counting fatalities related to conflict is a challenge--for example as highlighted by a 2008 review of various Iraq War conflict fatality counts, or as suggested by a more popular press review of body counts titled 'Body Counting: Why even the most-dubious statistics influence our thinking.'