NEW YORK — New conflict data and a United Nations review are fueling fresh warnings that peacebuilding is failing to keep pace with wars that increasingly cross borders, researchers and U.N. diplomats said Saturday. They argue the surge is being driven less by single, isolated wars and more by transnational forces — foreign backing, illicit finance and information manipulation — that strain traditional peacebuilding tools, Dec. 27, 2025.
Researchers at the Uppsala Conflict Data Program reported a historic high of 61 state-based conflicts in 2024, up from 59 the year before and the highest since records began in 1946. UCDP said 11 conflicts reached the level of war — at least 1,000 battle-related deaths in a year — and estimated nearly 160,000 people died in organized violence in 2024.
UCDP also recorded 13,900 deaths in attacks that explicitly targeted civilians, a 31% increase from 2023. The program said Ukraine remained the deadliest conflict, with about 76,000 battle-related deaths in 2024, while Israel’s wars in Gaza and against Hezbollah in Lebanon accounted for roughly 26,000 deaths, most of them civilians or people whose status could not be confirmed.
A separate assessment from the Peace Research Institute Oslo described the trend as more than a temporary spike. “This is not just a spike – it’s a structural shift,” PRIO Research Director Siri Aas Rustad said in the institute’s Conflict Trends briefing, which counted 61 state-based conflicts across 36 countries and warned that multiple crises are increasingly overlapping inside the same states.
Why peacebuilding is falling behind
Practitioners say the problem is not a lack of peacebuilding tools but how they are organized and financed. Armed groups recruit and fundraise across borders, outside powers arm local partners, and online incitement can inflame violence faster than diplomatic channels can respond. That mix can overwhelm peacebuilding approaches designed around short mandates, siloed aid programs and stop-start political attention.
PRIO said more than half of conflict-affected states now face two or more separate state-based conflicts — overlapping crises that complicate mediation, stretch humanitarian access and raise the risk that violence in one area fuels violence in another. Analysts say the result is a growing mismatch between what peacebuilding is asked to deliver and what it is resourced to do.
Transnational peacebuilding fixes gaining traction
At the U.N., member states recently closed out a once-every-five-years overhaul of the peacebuilding system with a sharper focus on prevention and measurable results. In a December review of the 2025 U.N. peacebuilding architecture process, the International Peace Institute said the twin resolutions adopted Nov. 26 expanded guidance for the Peacebuilding Commission, boosted attention to “impact,” created an annual “peacebuilding week” in June and encouraged more systematic engagement with regional organizations and international financial institutions.
Those moves echo the secretary-general’s 2023 New Agenda for Peace, which calls for rebuilding trust and solidarity and frames peacebuilding as an all-stages task — before, during and after conflict — rather than a post-crisis add-on.
Match cross-border threats with cross-border responses: Pair mediation with stronger action against illicit finance, arms flows and sanctions evasion that sustain armed groups, and treat these as core peacebuilding work.
Shift funding upstream: Make multi-year financing routine for national prevention strategies and local peacebuilding, not a short-term patch after violence peaks.
Defend the information space: Treat information integrity, online incitement and cyber disruption as central peacebuilding risks alongside political and security efforts.
The push to rethink peacebuilding has deep roots. The Brahimi Report in 2000 warned that ambitious mandates will fail without sustained political and material backing. The U.N. and World Bank later urged earlier investment in inclusive prevention in Pathways for Peace in 2018, and a 2021 essay from the Robert Bosch Stiftung argued that international peacebuilding efforts collapse when local actors are treated as subcontractors instead of partners.
Analysts say the latest conflict counts are making those warnings harder to ignore. Without faster, better financed and more transnational peacebuilding, they argue, record levels of conflict may become the new baseline.
