Some 1.5 billion people live in countries affected by repeated cycles of political and criminal violence, causing misery and disrupting development, the World Bank has said.
The countries affected by conflict and extreme criminal violence fall far behind in development and worsening the poverty situation in
the low income countries making it difficult for them to achieve a single Millennium Development Goal (MDG).
These are contained in the 2011 World Development Report released on Monday by the World Bank.
The World Development Report Dubbed: “Conflict, Security and Development” said some 42 million people out of the number were displaced as a result of conflict, violence and human rights abuses, with 15 million being refugees outside their country.
The report says: “To break these cycles, it is crucial to strengthen legitimate national institutions and governance in order to provide citizen security, justice and jobs to alleviate international stresses that increase the risks of violent conflict.”
According to the report, more than 90 per cent of civil wars in the 2000s occurred in countries that already experienced a civil war
30 years earlier.
The report noted that without a basic level of citizen security there could not be enduring social and economic development, adding that without a sufficiently broad coalition based on confidence in improved justice and shared economic prospects, it was difficult to sustain the momentum of change.
The report said exceptional efforts were needed to restore confidence in national leaders’ ability to manage the crisis through a combination of actions that signalled a break with the past and gestures that locked in these actions, thus giving people confidence
that they would not be reversed.
According to the report, youth unemployment, inequality between social, ethnic, regional or religious groups, economic shocks as well as infiltration of trafficking networks and foreign security interference were some of the negative effects.
It observed the current system of diplomatic, security and development institutions designed to address the problem of interstate
and civil war had helped many countries to recover from civil war.
The report called for the need to invest in prevention through confidence-building, citizen security, justice and jobs, reforming internal agency procedure to manage risks and results, acting regionally and globally on external stresses, and marshalling the combined experience and resources of low, middle and high income
countries in tackling violence.