The Caribbean region suffers from some of the world’s highest rates of violent deaths, at almost three times the global average, as well as one of the world’s highest rates of violent deaths among women. Firearms are used in more than half of all homicides, with this proportion reaching 90 per cent in some countries. While much emphasis has been placed on firearms control at both the political and operational levels, illicit firearms, and the dynamics of illicit arms markets in this region have received little research attention.

Situation Update: South Sudan

Upper Nile is on the precipice of renewed armed conflict. After a lull in violence in the past two months, armed groups are mobilizing for possible confrontation as Johnson Olonyi’s Agwelek forces reposition themselves near key ports on the White Nile, and SPLA-IO and Nuer White Army forces mobilize youth in northern Jonglei and southern Upper Nile.

Almost one in three women across the globe — some 736 million women in total — have been subjected to physical and/or sexual violence at least once in their lifetime, according to a landmark meta-analysis published by the World Health Organization in 2021. The presence of a firearm in the family home increases the risk not only that such acts will be committed but also that they will result in the death of the victim...

Every 35 hours, a woman is assassinated in Argentina just for being a woman. This dire situation unleashed a wave of protests, beginning on 3 June 2015 with a march under the slogan 'Ni una menos' ('Not one [woman] less'). National authorities reacted by putting the issue at the top of the public agenda and adopting a range of actions to prevent and eradicate gender-based violence...

In Warrap state, home to South Sudanese President Salva Kiir and much of the country's political and military elite, many hoped that the signing of a peace agreement in 2018 would bring an end to the violence that had scarred their country for the previous five years. Instead, in Warrap, violence intensified, and pitted communities against each other in increasingly brutal tit-for-tat attacks that targeted women, children, homes, and the very capacities of communities to sustain life. At the war's end, everything became war.

'In January 2022, in a bid to stem a tide of violent attacks and kidnappings in north-western Nigeria, the government labelled the armed groups involved in the violence as "terrorists". The relationship between these groups and the internationally designated terrorist groups Boko Haram and Islamic State in West Africa Province in north-eastern Nigeria was unclear. But the decision illustrated growing concern that violent extremism might spread to the country's north-west. It also raised questions about the types of measures that were needed to prevent escalation of violence...'

Upper Nile is in chaos. A once durable alliance between the national government in Juba and the Padang Dinka in Malakal has given way to a much more uncertain situation, in which the regime of South Sudanese President Salva Kiir sets feuding elites against each other. Disorder has proved an effective tool of rule.

The UNDP and the Small Arms Survey presented the findings of a joint report on violent extremism in the southern Libya borderlands and North-Western Nigeria, during an event at Geneva Peace Week 2022.

Are we on track towards peace? This question is essential to planning, developing, and evaluating any peacebuilding project, but the answer is contingent on data availability. To this end, the Global Violent Deaths (GVD) database, developed and updated regularly by the Small Arms Survey since 2004, collects information on direct conflict deaths and intentional homicides, which is combined in a single violent deaths indicator.

The archive of the Human Security Baseline Assessment (HSBA) for Sudan and South Sudan project is a set of pages centralizing older updates and versions of HSBA documents and publications from the former HSBA website. All documents in the archive include a time stamp with the respective date of publication and are listed in chronological order. The archive is divided into the following categories: