Global Conflicts Reach New High Since 1946

There were 65 conflicts involving at least one state recorded worldwide last year, a new high since 1946, according to a study published Tuesday.

The annual 'Conflict Trends’ report from the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) found that 2025 was also the third-deadliest year for conflict since the Cold War, with more deaths only in 1994 and 2021.

'Usually I'm able to sort of squeeze something positive out of it, but this year it's shocking, the numbers,' researcher Siri Aas Rustad told reporters.

The number of conflicts between states also hit a new 80-year peak, doubling from 2024 to eight, with clashes between India and Pakistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Cambodia and Thailand, as well as Russia's ongoing invasion of neighboring Ukraine.

Some 35 countries were involved in fighting, but less than half of them had only one conflict. Israel, for example, was simultaneously party to multiple different conflicts — in Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, Iran and against Houthi rebels in Yemen.

'This trend points to a growing 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.

The PRIO research is based on figures compiled by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), linked to Uppsala University in Sweden. It breaks down organized violence into three categories: conflicts involving at least one state, non-state conflicts, and one-sided violence against civilians.

The report found there were 75 non-state conflicts in 2025, a slight decline from 79 in 2024. It said that there had been a particularly notable drop in lethal violence between Mexican drug cartels last year.

Third-deadliest year since Cold War

According to the report, some 245,000 people were killed in battle-related deaths in 2025, making it the third most deadly year in the post-Cold War era. That was mainly driven by Russia's war in Ukraine, the violence in Sudan and Israel's bombing campaign in Gaza.

Nearly 76,500 of the battle-related deaths were attributed to attacks directly targeting civilians — a dramatic increase from 14,200 in 2024.

Only 1994 and 2021 were more deadly. That was put down to the Rwandan genocide, in which some 800,000 people were massacred, and the civil war in Ethiopia's Tigray region in which hundreds of thousands were killed between 2020 and 2022.

The PRIO report said there were more deaths due to fighting from the past five years than the entire two decades prior to 2021.

'What has happened in the past five or six years is that we have several big conflicts going on at the same time and they seem to take over from each other. The world doesn't get any break,' Rustad said.

'And that's different from previously — this continuous high intensity level of conflict globally,' she added.