Collin J. Meisel, University of Denver
With major conflicts in Africa, the Middle East, Europe and Southeast Asia, 1 in 8 people worldwide were exposed to conflict in 2024 – proving another fraught year in terms of human suffering on a mass scale. In fact, 111 countries around the world experienced some form of mass atrocity during the year.
That’s what colleagues and I at the University of Denver’s Pardee Instituteconfirmed when analyzing our updated global dataset on recent and ongoing mass atrocities.
Covering nearly 200 countries, the goal of the project is to go beyond any single tragedy or conflict and objectively try to determine the level of humanitarian suffering in places around the world. Each country is then assigned a 0-100 score on our Atrocities Scope and Scale Heuristic – providing a single metric for the breadth and severity of atrocities committed within a certain year.
In the project, we define mass atrocity as an act of violence against 25 or more defenseless members of a social, cultural, ethnic, religious or political group — or threats to the group’s survival.
Although we saw fewer atrocities globally in 2024 than in 2023, there were still more than in any other year since 2018. And while lethal atrocities were fewer in number in 2024 relative to the previous year, several types of “less lethal” atrocities – actions involving gross, intentional violations of human rights on a mass scale short of murder – were more numerous.
From worst to still bad
In 2023, the situation was bleak across the board. More than 1 million people were forcibly displaced from their homes in war-torn Ukraine and the Gaza Strip. Tens of thousands of civilians were killed across Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. And in the first few months of Israel’s war in Gaza, the daily death rate was higher than any other conflict in the 21st century.
In 2024, there was a slight decrease in the total magnitude of atrocities relative to the prior year, though much of the worldwide suffering continued. By the end of the year, roughly 19 in 20 Palestinians living in Gaza had been forcibly displaced at least once, and most, several times. After nearly four years of civil war, mass murder of civilians in Myanmar’s ongoing conflict continued apace. The country’s ruling junta tortured and reportedly burned people alive, and both the military and rival Arakan Army rebel group are alleged to have engaged in ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims, with ethnic tensions rippling across the border into India.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the humanitarian situation also remained grim. The Congolese government began to eject United Nations peacekeepers and those of a regional African peacekeeping force after getting fed up with the U.N.’s inability to quell the violence in Congo’s North Kivu and Ituri provinces – northeastern regions of the country plagued by murder and rape from groups like the Rwanda-backed M23 militia.
Sudan provided another egregious example of the escalation of atrocities in 2024. As the civil war raged on, the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group committed numerous extrajudicial executions of Sudanese military forces. This came against the background of widespread sexual slavery and other atrocities within Sudan’s combat zones – including those perpetrated by the Sudanese military itself, like the bombing of civilian targets.
ncidents of what my team deem to be lower-level atrocities persisted elsewhere and outside of active humanitarian crisis zones, from groups in South Africa attacking Zimbabwean migrants for suspected “witchcraft” to German police beatingPalestinians during last spring’s international protests against the war in Gaza. [Abridged]
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