War Reloaded: The Erosion of Norms and the Urgency of Prevention
After decades of cautious optimism about the global decline of warfare, recent trends paint a far more troubling picture. Civilians are increasingly caught in the crossfire, non-State armed groups and private military contractors proliferate, and new technologies are making belligerent engagement more remote and frequent.
In this context, the erosion of international norms and weakening of conflict-prevention mechanisms demand urgent global attention. The Geneva Academy’s IHL in Focus Report (2025) reveals a resurgence of international armed conflicts and persistent instability within a growing number of States. This moment calls not for complacency but for a recalibration—one grounded in international law, proactive diplomacy, and resilience-building in the world’s most fragile societies.
Understanding Today’s Shifting Patterns of War
In February 2025, the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights launched its first annual IHL in Focus Report, examining violations of international humanitarian law (IHL) across 22 countries using large, open-source data sets. Compared to the previous year, the report identified a slight decrease in non-international armed conflicts (NIACs) from 61 to 57. Yet the report recorded a significant increase in international armed conflicts (IACs) from 8 to 14. Similar trends have been reported by humanitarian organisations, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, as well as academic projects, such as the Uppsala Conflict Data Program.
Everyone should be troubled by this. Wars have horrific consequences. They cause fear, death, and suffering, the heaviest share of which falls on society’s most vulnerable members. Conflicts are also devastating to national economies. Moreover, these costs of conflict—financial effects, refugee movements, organised crime and extremism (which thrive during conflict)—spill over onto neighbours, reducing their resilience to conflict.
It is also important to view these data through a historical lens. Certainly, until about fifteen years ago, the world was on a fairly steady trajectory of conflict decline, especially IACs involving wealthy States. Rich countries, it seemed, just weren’t going to war anymore, with each other or anyone else, and when they did, war was brief, usually under a year. At the domestic level and particularly in low-income, poor-growth States, armed conflict seemed to be a little more robust. But even then, looking from a perspective of battle deaths and conflict duration, the world was, more or less, getting statistically safer.
Syria’s fall into conflict in 2011 was largely considered an anomaly; its length, the number of actors and its proxy dimensions caught analysts by surprise. Since then, however, the world has seen Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a horrific war in Gaza, and punctuating hostility between adversaries such as Rwanda-Democratic Republic of Congo, Iran-Israel and China-Taiwan.
Does this mean that the trend towards peacefulness is over and the world has moved into something new and sinister? Most would say no, but for the current geopolitical moment, which adds both context and some clues about where things might be headed.
To unpack this, we must consider the (albeit contested) evidence on why conflicts erupt. For example, economics appear to play a role. Slow growth, low incomes, and price volatility tend to correlate with the precursor environment to conflict. Likewise, contexts of healthy pluralism—where ethnic, religious, and linguistic minorities enjoy protection and empowerment—tend to be more resilient to conflict. Governance is also important; weak and malfunctioning institutions, corruption, and violence on the part of State actors again are common conflict bedfellows.
If these observations are applied to the current, larger geopolitical context, the conclusion is foreboding. The world may be set for a global recession if trade wars and protectionism in a globalized economy only head in one direction. The climate for minorities is poor. Even prior to the installation of new political regimes, the rise of populist governments had unleashed strong policy pushback on the rights afforded to women, migrants, and sexual identity groups. And powerful States engage in rule-breaking, including territorial encroachment and acts of aggression. Such brazenness is contagious; it has created more space for retaliatory brinkmanship and expansionist and opportunistic behaviour.
Trends in IHL Violations – Actors, Tactics, and Technologies
The IHL in Focus Report also examined what is happening inside conflicts. Four trends warrant particular attention.
The first is the scale of, and belligerents’ propensity for, targeting civilians. The two most consistently targeted groups were children—who were recruited and used in combat—and women and girls with sexual violence. These IHL violations must be understood as having immediate, compound, and long-term impacts. Child recruitment not only creates a high risk of injury and death. It also strongly associates with other forms of violence like sexual exploitation.
Longer-term consequences are equally problematic. Children’s exposure to violence, separation from family, and interruption in education create deeply entrenched socio-behavioural deficits that, unless addressed, tend to go on to manifest in cyclical violence like criminality and group reattachment. Likewise, in the case of sexual crimes, survivors face not only immediate physical and psychological impacts but also stigmatization and rejection, phenomena that easily become intergenerational, especially when children are born from the violence.
A second observation concerns the participation of non-State armed groups (NSAG) as parties to a conflict. This number is high across the 57 NIACs taking place in 22 countries. The report identified 61 NSAG parties and that number appears to be growing over time. This raises a number of concerns. It signals that conflicts are getting more chaotic and dynamic. It also changes the nature of the violence that spills over onto civilian populations. For example, the report’s entry on the Central African Republic suggests that NSAGs are responsible for the majority of conflict-related sexual violence. In Yemen, the Houthis can be seen as favoring the use of IEDs and other simple explosive devices, including around schools, mosques, and community water sources.
The most likely explanation for this is practical. NSAG are less organised, smaller, and less aware of their IHL obligations. Or they may lack the capacity or resources to engage in IHL-compliant actions, like proportionality assessments. In some cases, these groups claim to exist outside the mainstream community of States, meaning they don’t feel beholden to its norms, including IHL. The abduction of girls and use of female suicide bombers, for example, is a tactic highly specific to Boko Haram.
Then there are two thematic trends, not necessarily voluminous, but highly significant in terms of future conflict trajectories. The first is the use of private military companies (PMCs), such as the Wagner Group. While such groups are not party to many conflicts, what they offer is highly attractive. For States that want to engage a neighbour or an in-country threat, PMCs can offer an inroad that is cheap, has reduced political risk, and gives access to skills and hardware that may not exist domestically. PMCs, however, increase the frequency and intensity of conflict and tend to be less constrained by IHL (not because they’re not legally obligated, but because their relationships with States can be more opaque).
The other trend features innovations in digital military technology, especially drones, which are becoming cheaper, more accessible, and simpler to operate. Again, their significance is not in the volume of use but rather in their potential to change the character of warfare. Unmanned systems modify the cost-opportunity metric of belligerent engagement. This is mainly because States can avoid hardware losses and soldier casualties, but there’s also some evidence that the physical and sensory distancing of military personnel from the battlefield can reduce combat inhibition. In short, killing and striking become easier, and when it’s easier, we see more of it. This is extremely concerning in a context where respect for IHL appears to be on the decline.
Reasserting Norms and Emphasising Prevention
Together these threads—an increasing volume of armed conflict, trends in the targeting of civilians, the rise of NSAGs, and new modalities that encourage belligerent engagement—signal that red lines are shifting, both organically and tactically.
Above all else, these developments must be understood as a clarion call for conflict prevention. It’s difficult to overemphasize its importance. Irrespective of how we arrived here, the geopolitical community is fragmented, power blocs are reconfiguring, and there is a malaise around norms once understood to be highly robust and universal. At the same time, the tools that have been built up over decades to de-escalate and end conflict have been weakened and, in some cases, have lost legitimacy. This is a recipe for a downward-reinforcing conflict cycle. Therefore, the emphasis must be on prevention.
How can prevention be operationalized? At the top of this list sits States’ obligation to respect and ensure respect for the basic tenets of international law. This duty rests at the fore of diplomatic engagement, at the UN, in regional fora and within governments. Compliance with international law must also be tackled through the multilateral system. It’s easy to look at the Security Council and International Criminal Court and conclude that the peace and security architecture is in shambles. But the system is not stagnant. Arria formula meetings, statements at the Human Rights Council, and human rights fact-finding missions remain important tools that can be harnessed. In fact, they become even more powerful when traditional modalities of engagement fall silent.
Programming decisions can also support prevention. The risk that funding cuts result in a scaling back of livelihoods and gender and minority protection activities in fragile States must be understood as a serious misstep. A landscape where corruption and discrimination are rife, where free speech and civil society action are restricted, and where youth have limited scope for occupational or social mobility can lower resilience to conflict and increase the risk of group-specific IHL violations during conflict.
A final action area concerns conflict recidivism. The statistical risk is very high; between 20 and 50 percent of NIACs relapse within five years. Put differently, if the aim is to prevent armed conflict globally, the most effective and efficient means is to ensure that peace sticks. Importantly, quite a bit is known about preventing recidivism. From an IHL perspective, the most important message is that as societies repair and stabilize, what happened during a war matters. Be it sexual violence, attacks on cultural heritage, or enforced disappearances, these typologies of violence uniquely sow discord between groups. They hamper recovery, which in turn heightens the risk of recidivism. The only way to push back on this is to strengthen parties’ knowledge of, and commitment to, IHL.
Concluding Thoughts
The trajectory set out in this post is not inevitable, but it speaks to urgency. The reemergence of international armed conflicts, the proliferation of actors willing to violate humanitarian norms, and the erosion of accountability demand more than observation; they require action. Conflict prevention must be re-centred as a global priority, grounded in international law, driven by inclusive governance, and supported by a more resilient multilateralism.
The tools still exist, and so does the legal and moral framework to guide their use. What’s needed now is the political will to reinvest in these foundations, to restore trust, reaffirm red lines, and resist the normalization of war.
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Dr Erica Harper is Head of Research and Policy Studies at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights.
The views expressed are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Articles of War is a forum for professionals to share opinions and cultivate ideas. Articles of War does not screen articles to fit a particular editorial agenda, nor endorse or advocate material that is published. Authorship does not indicate affiliation with Articles of War, the Lieber Institute, or the United States Military Academy West Point.
Photo credit: 24th Mechanized Brigade of the Ukrainian military
