Editor’s Introduction

Political, military and humanitarian trends rarely stop at the calendar mark. The logic of armed violence unfolds according to the incentives and the constraints of the actors organising it. Conflict drivers are deeply interwoven in a country’s political and socio-economic challenges, often rooted in historical pitfalls. An in-depth analysis of the conflicts active in the past year, however, allows us to reflect on what we learned from recent events and hone our understanding of the drivers and dynamics shaping today’s wars. The 33 conflict reports in The Armed Conflict Survey 2019 aim to do exactly that – to explain why armed conflicts occur, what drives and what sustains them. The introductions at the beginning of the regional sections identify what features set each conflict apart, and what dynamics recur across different theatres. The four essays opening the book delve into those key trends, tracing how they unfold and drive conflict developments in the short to long term. Our annual review is thus necessarily a balancing exercise between understanding the continuity of conflict drivers and dynamics, and spotting the new trajectories that they are likely to both generate and follow. This combination offers the reader the analytical tools necessary to see through the complexity of modern armed conflicts and the insights needed to draw informed conclusions from them.