Though not much concerned with anything currently happening in Myanmar, or indeed in most other individual states, the Human Security Report 2013 released last week by Canada’s Simon Fraser University provides an important backdrop to humanitarian work the world over. It looks particularly at the thesis advanced by Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, published by Penguin in 2011. The summary of this book presented in the first dozen pages of a 120-page report is outstanding.

Taking a huge span of more than 12 millennia stretching back at least to 10,000 BCE, Pinker argues for a clear fall in global deaths from warfare and murder, and also in extreme forms of violence such as torture, rape and slavery. He acknowledges that there have been ups and downs along the way, that real reversals have always been a key part of the picture, but nevertheless maintains that the overall worldwide pattern is declinist.

Just as interesting as the data are five trend changes Pinker identifies as layered drivers of this long-term reduction in violence. The first is a pacification process traceable across thousands of years that saw hunter-gatherer and hunter-horticulturist communities give way to settled agricultural societies and then to modern nation-states. The second is a civilizing process dating from the late medieval period and associated with growth and consolidation of the European state system. The third is a humanitarian revolution starting in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that secured abolition of the institution of slavery and committed action against torture and other cruel and inhumane practices. The fourth is the long peace that dawned at the end of the Second World War and triggered the elimination of great power wars, a dramatic fall in the deadliness of other global conflicts, and the creation of international legal constraints on war. The fifth is the new peace that emerged after the collapse of the Cold War and resulted in fewer conflicts within states plus innovations in global security governance.

Perhaps most interesting to Myanmar watchers in all this is the final contention about the post-Cold War role of what Michael Barnett calls the “humanitarian international”. Spearheaded by the UN and embracing major aid agencies, donor governments and INGOs, it has created an evolving system of global governance that remains, in the words of HSR 2013, “inchoate, disputatious, inefficient, and prone to tragic mistakes”. Nevertheless, in recent decades that system has contributed to a clear reduction in the number and deadliness of armed conflicts.

HSR 2013 notes that Pinker’s is, in part, a structural analysis of how “long-term changes in culture and material circumstance have, over time, permitted the better angels of human nature to prevail over its inner demons”. It stands as a major contribution to our understanding of the wider context in which contemporary events in states like Myanmar play out.