Armed conflicts in 2020–21

The Armed Conflict Survey 2021 includes 34 armed conflicts that were ongoing in the period under review, running between 1 January 2020 and 28 February 2021, with some limited exceptions.¹ Five world regions are considered (Americas, Asia, Europe and Eurasia, Middle East and North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa), as we have regrouped the two sections that previously covered the Asia-Pacific and South Asia separately into a single Asia section. New regional essays provide comprehensive analysis at the beginning of each regional section, identifying underlying drivers and crucial trends in ongoing conflicts during the review period and assessing the regional outlook and potential future conflict hotspots for the year ahead. Coverage of individual conflicts takes two formats: longer Conflict Reports and shorter Conflict Summaries depending on their global relevance as assessed by our analysis.

The list of conflicts in the 2021 edition differs slightly from the 2020 edition. The Armed Conflict Survey 2021 includes the conflict in Mozambique for the first time. Since 2017, when the insurgency began in the country’s northern Cabo Delgado province, the conflict has progressively accelerated. 2020 was the deadliest year on record as the main non-state armed group (NSAG), Ahlu al-Sunnah wal-Jamaah (locally known as ‘al-Shabaab’), continued its expansion north and south of Cabo Delgado’s coast and scaled up its military and organisational capabilities. The analysis of the Sahel conflict also covers Niger, in addition to Mali and Burkina Faso, given the former’s increasing involvement in the regional conflict. We have adjusted the Americas section to reflect the most relevant trends in organised armed violence in the period under review. In this vein, the Brazil chapter centres on organised violence in Rio de Janeiro and Amazonas (rather than Rio de Janeiro and Ceará, as was the case for The Armed Conflict Survey 2020) given the increased strategic significance of Amazonas state as a major point of criminal contestation between NSAGs against the backdrop of its vast river network and shared borders with major coca-producing countries. The focus of the Colombia chapter has also been broadened from bandas criminales (or BACRIMs) to other types of NSAGs, including the dissident groups of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the National Liberation Army (ELN) and drug cartels.

Criteria for inclusion and removal

Defining armed conflict as a military or violent phenomenon means The Armed Conflict Survey 2021 does not aim to determine the applicability of international humanitarian law to different conflict situations (as in the Geneva Conventions or the Rome Statute).

The Armed Conflict Survey includes armed confrontations that meet our criteria in terms of duration, intensity and organisation of the conflict parties.

We require an armed conflict to run for at least three months and feature violent incidents on a weekly or at least fortnightly basis. The Armed Conflict Survey’s definition of armed conflict does not involve a numerical threshold of battle-related deaths, contrary to conflict datasets such as the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP). For wars between states – which feature substantial levels of military mobilisation, simultaneous and numerous armed clashes, or significant fatalities – the duration threshold may be relaxed.

The organisation of the conflict parties refers to their ability to plan and execute military operations or violent attacks. The scale of such attacks is not a factor in this determination – for the purpose of inclusion in The Armed Conflict Survey 2021, for example, planting improvised explosive devices (IEDs) is equivalent to battlefield clashes. For armed conflicts that involve state parties, the deployment of armed forces or militarised (not regular) police is required. NSAGs must demonstrate some logistical and operational capacity, such as access to weapons and other military equipment, or an ability to devise strategies and carry out operations, coordinate activities, establish communication between members, and recruit and train personnel. Territorial control or a permanent base in an area is not required. The Armed Conflict Survey 2021 also remains agnostic about the type of organisational structure adopted by armed groups. Not all NSAGs have a distinct and effective chain of command – such as many of those operating in sub-Saharan Africa – but can be highly decentralised, maintain an amorphous structure, rely on a transnational network, or have a global reach. A hierarchical military structure is therefore not an inclusion criterion. In each conflict chapter, the Conflict Parties table lists the main organisational capabilities of the actors involved.²

The Armed Conflict Survey 2021 excludes cases of one-sided application of lethal force, terrorist attacks and public protests. Regardless of scale, instances of government repression, ethnic cleansing or genocide that occur outside of a conflict situation are not included until the population displays a capacity to fight back through an armed, organised resistance, or another state wages war – as in the case of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia when Vietnam invaded in 1979. While terrorist attacks may lead to the domestic deployment of armed forces, the rarity of these events means they fail the intensity test. Situations with widespread but unorganised criminal activity are also excluded.

Our definition takes an inclusive approach to the different motivations that drive armed conflict. Indeed, The Armed Conflict Survey 2021 includes conflicts with drivers that are political, socio-economic, ideological, religious or criminal. This is particularly evident in featured conflicts in Mexico or Central America where the main parties are criminal groups with elusive political or ideological motives.

The Armed Conflict Survey 2021 applies two criteria for removal. Armed conflicts that have lost the above-defined characteristics for inclusion are removed after two years. An armed conflict terminated through a peace agreement also ceases to be included following the military demobilisation of all conflict parties.

Classification and categorisation of armed conflicts: scope and actors

The unit of analysis in The Armed Conflict Survey 2021 remains the conflict itself, that is, the military or violent confrontation between armed actors. In most cases, conflicts take place within the boundaries of a state and are therefore listed under those country names. One exception to this rule is when multiple conflicts coexist in the same country, such as in the Philippines, where the government is simultaneously fighting the Moro Muslim rebels in western Mindanao and the Maoist rebels of the New People’s Army (NPA). In these instances, the name of the country is listed along with the name of the main insurgent group. Other conflicts have a regional scope, unfolding across multiple states. This is the case for the insurgency in the Lake Chad Basin – which involves parts of Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria – or the multifaceted and interrelated conflicts in the Sahel, spanning Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger. Conflicts that have elements of inter-state confrontation either take the name of the disputed region (Nagorno-Karabakh or Kashmir) or the parties involved (Israel–Palestinian Territories).

Conflicts may involve state or non-state actors. According to the types of actors involved and the interactions between them, armed conflicts have been grouped into one of three categories: interstate (or international) conflicts, internal conflicts or internationalised-internal conflicts.

An inter-state conflict involves two or more states (or a group of states) and takes place on the territory of one or several states, as well as in the global commons.

An internal conflict takes place in the territory of one state and is either fought by a government (and possibly allied armed groups) against one or more NSAGs, or between two or more NSAGs without the direct participation of state forces. Within this category, we include the sub-categories of localised insurgencies (such as the one ongoing in southern Thailand), intercommunal conflicts (such as the one in Sudan) and organised crime (such as most of the conflicts in the Americas). However, these groupings are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and many internal conflicts feature characteristics of two or more sub-categories.

Lastly, internationalised-internal conflicts are confrontations in which the kernel of the dispute remains domestic, but which feature military intervention by one or more external states. Such involvement may include training, equipping or providing military intelligence to a conflict party or participating in the hostilities, either directly or through local proxies and sponsored actors.

The Armed Conflict Global Relevance Indicator (ACGRI)

As an additional tool for analysis and prioritisation, The Armed Conflict Survey 2021 introduces a new composite indicator to assess the global significance of armed conflicts (see Editor’s Introduction for details).

Given data availability and comparability challenges at the conflict level, the Armed Conflict Global Relevance Indicator (ACGRI) uses the country in which conflicts happen as the unit of analysis rather than the conflicts themselves. This methodological choice is justified by the fact that most of the 34 armed conflicts covered are internal (internationalised or not), meaning the conflict can be assimilated to the country in which it takes place. Wherever there are multiple insurgencies taking place at once in the same country (namely the cases of India and the Philippines), the country score encompasses all of those. On the other hand, it will not be possible to differentiate the global significance of each domestic insurgency in isolation. In a similar fashion, conflicts that spill over national borders and affect several countries (such as those in the Sahel and Lake Chad Basin) are not given a regional score, with global relevance assessed instead at the level of each country involved.

In contrast, for the conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh and Israel–Palestinian Territories, the unit of analysis is the conflict itself. India and Pakistan are treated separately in the case of the conflict in Jammu and Kashmir due to the presence of other localised insurgencies in both countries. Geopolitical indicators relevant to Kashmir (such as the number of United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions) are attributed to both countries to ensure that the final score reflects the geopolitical impact of the inter-state conflict.

The ACGRI is organised around the three pillars of human impact, incidence and geopolitical impact and is composed of a total of eight variables (see Table 1). These variables are good proxies of the dimensions of global relevance we seek to cover, considering the availability of reliable data.

As a preliminary step to combine variable scores into pillar and ACGRI scores, data for each variable is normalised on a 0–10 scale, through the following approach:

where the indicator data refers to continuous data, y refers to the maximum value from the target countries, and 0 is used as the minimum value.

Each pillar score is the arithmetic mean of the composing variable, multiplied by 10, giving a pillar score between 0 and 100. The ACGRI score is, in turn, the arithmetic mean of the three pillars.

The scores of the ACGRI and its composing pillars are displayed throughout the book in a continuous colour progression (using conditional formatting) in order to respect the (cardinal instead of ordinal) distance between countries and to reflect more precisely the differentiation of conflicts’ global relevance based on the continuum of the ACGRI scores for the full sample.

Data for all the variables included in the ACGRI is listed in the Data Appendix, along with detailed source information and the underlying calculation methodology for each variable.

Selected data from the ACGRI is also featured in the ‘Key Conflict Statistics’ boxes in each conflict chapter, as well as other background variables relevant to the context under analysis, such as the Gini index, GDP per capita (based on purchasing power parity in current prices–international dollars) and the Functioning of Government pillar of the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index. Full data for all these background variables is also contained in the Data Appendix.

The Chart of Armed Conflict

The Chart of Armed Conflict provides relevant data and information for the 34 conflicts included in The Armed Conflict Survey 2021, such as the start date (according to IISS analysis), conflict typology, number of refugees and UNSC resolutions, as well as flags corresponding to multilateral missions and third-party foreign countries deemed to be involved in the conflict.⁶

Multilateral missions included are conflict-related multilateral peace operations – either conducted under the aegis of the UN or a regional organisation, or ad hoc coalitions of states authorised by the UN – that support the peace process and facilitate peacebuilding and conflict prevention. Civilian and political missions, which do not involve armed forces, are also listed at the bottom of the Chart.⁷ Data is obtained from the Military Balance+, SIPRI, and the official websites of the UN, regional organisations and ad hoc coalitions.

Foreign countries are deemed to be ‘involved’ as third parties in a conflict if they meet the following criteria:

Either:

• •  Deployment of military capabilities (outside of a multilateral mission as defined above)

Or all of the following:

• •  Presence of intelligence assets
• •  Provision of military financial support
• •  Role in an advisory or in operational command-and-control capacity
• •  Sale or transfer of military equipment.