International think tank Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) founder Steve Killelea said on Thursday that because more countries are becoming involved in international conflicts beyond their borders, it is imperative that governments and businesses intensify their efforts to resolve the many minor conflicts before they escalate into larger crises.

Speaking exclusively with Polity, Killelea said this made conflicts much more difficult to solve.

This week, the IEP released the eighteenth edition of the Global Peace Index, which revealed that there was a risk of a surge in major conflicts.

In 2023, 97 countries deteriorated in peacefulness, more than any year since the inception of the Global Peace Index.

“So the surge in unsolved conflicts, sometimes termed forgotten wars or forever wars, is troubling. If we went back to 2009, we looked at Ethiopia, Gaza and the Ukraine, [those] were considered minor conflicts,” he said.

He explained that the rising number of minor conflicts increased the likelihood of more major conflicts in the future.

“Over the past decade, peacefulness has declined in nine out of the ten years. We are witnessing a record number of conflicts, a rise in militarisation, and heightened international strategic competition,” he said.

This as a result of wars in Ukraine, with Russia become an militarised industrial complex, he noted.

Conflict negatively affected the global economy, and business risks from conflicts had never been higher, compounding the current global economic vulnerabilities, he said.

Last year recorded 162 000 conflict-related deaths, the second highest toll in the past 30 years, with the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza accounting for nearly three-quarters of deaths.

Ukraine represented more than half, recording 83 000 conflict deaths, with estimates of at least 33 000 for Palestine, up to April 2024.

“In the first four months of 2024, conflict-related deaths globally amounted to 47 000. If the same rate continues for the rest of this year, it would be the highest number of conflict deaths since the Rwandan genocide in 1994,” the report noted.

Meanwhile, 110-million people were either refugees or internally displaced owing to violent conflict, with 16 countries now hosting more than half a million refugees.

He said there was a need for the international community to fund more, to help many of these refugees.

Killelea also highlighted that the global economic impact of violence increased to $19.1-trillion in 2023, representing 13.5% of global GDP.

He said exposure to conflict posed a significant supply chain risk for governments and businesses.