There were 65 conflicts involving at least one state recorded around the world last year, a new high since 1946, according to a study published on Tuesday.
annual “Conflict Trends” report The Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) found that 2025 was the third deadliest year for the conflict since the Cold War, with only 1994 and 2021 having more deaths.
“Normally I’m able to squeeze something positive out of it, but this year it’s a shocking number,” researcher Siri Aas Rustad told reporters.
The number of conflicts between two states also reached a new 80-year high, doubling to eight by 2024, with conflicts between India and Pakistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Cambodia and Thailand, as well as Russia’s ongoing invasion of neighboring Ukraine.
About 35 countries were involved in the fighting, but less than half of them had only one conflict. For example, Israel was a participant in several different conflicts simultaneously – against Houthi rebels in Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Yemen.
“This trend points to increasing complexity in conflict dynamics, with more actors involved, which has important implications for how we analyze and respond to conflict,” the report said.
Africa was the continent most affected by state-based conflict, followed by Asia, the Middle East, the Americas, and Europe.
PRIO’s research is based on data compiled by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), affiliated with Uppsala University in Norway. It divides organized violence into three categories: conflicts involving at least one state, non-state conflicts, and unilateral violence against civilians.
The report found that there were 75 non-state conflicts in 2025, a slight decline from 79 in 2024. It said there was a particularly notable decline in deadly violence among Mexican drug cartels last year.
Third deadliest year after the Cold War
According to the report, about 245,000 people are expected to die in war-related deaths in 2025, making it the third deadliest year since the Cold War. It was primarily inspired by Russia’s war in Ukraine, violence in Sudan, and Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza.
About 76,500 war-related deaths were directly caused by attacks targeting civilians – a dramatic increase from 14,200 in 2024.
Only 1994 and 2021 were more deadly. It was blamed for the Rwandan genocide, in which approximately 800,000 people were massacred, and the civil war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, which left hundreds of thousands dead between 2020 and 2022.
The PRIO report said there were more deaths due to fighting in the last five years than in the entire two decades before 2021.
“What’s happened over the last five or six years is that we have several major conflicts going on at the same time and they seem to be overlapping each other. The world doesn’t care about that,” Rustad said.
He added, “And it’s different than before – this sustained high intensity level of conflict globally.”
Edited by Shawn Sinico
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