In the years since the Global Burden of Armed Violence 2011 was published, different forms of violence, instability, and conflict have erupted in places such as the Central African Republic, Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine. Waves of criminal violence have continued to sweep across Honduras, Venezuela, and other parts of Latin America. Armed violence continues to claim lives, undermine the stability of states and communities, and threaten the achievement of sustainable human development.

This edition of the Global Burden of Armed Violence charts and analyses some of these developments while maintaining the ‘unified approach’ to armed violence introduced in the previous edition. By relying on data from a large variety of sources–including public health, law enforcement, and criminal justice authorities as well as independent observatories, human rights organizations, and international agencies–this approach allows for the monitoring of changes and trends in the levels of armed violence at the local, national, regional, and global levels. Its focus is broad enough to capture interpersonal, political, criminal, economic, and conflict violence–some of which regularly overlap and fuel each other.

This volume presents analysis of comprehensive data for the period 2007–12 as well as assessments of more recent trends and dynamics in lethal violence in both conflict and non-conflict settings. Thanks to marked improvements in the collection and reporting of disaggregated lethal violence data in many countries, its chapters are able to offer more robust and simultaneously more nuanced assessments of changes in various aspects of lethal violence over time, including the use of firearms and gender-based victimization. In proposing a new calculation method for estimating the global economic cost of homicide, this edition also takes a significant step towards quantifying the costs of armed violence.

In view of the post-2015 development framework negotiations, the report keeps in focus the negative impact of violence and insecurity on development and weighs the potential benefits of integrating a peace and security goal in the new development agenda.