The report, which was released Monday, also found armed conflicts -- defined as 1,000 or more battle-deaths per year -- dropped by 80 percent since 1992, roughly about the time the Cold War ended.

The 200-page report also found wars between countries are rarer and now constitute less than 5 percent of all armed conflicts; separately, the number of military coups declined by 60 percent since 1963.

The definition of armed conflict is narrow as it does not include genocide, and so excludes the death tolls for such genocides as Rwanda and Srebrenica. The data also does not include the indirect deaths from weapons such as landmines that are left after a conflict.

According to the report, the reason for the decline in armed conflict is three fold: The end of colonialism, which previously made up 60 percent of all international conflicts. The end of the Cold War, which had driven one-third of all conflicts following World War II; and an increase in international activities to stop ongoing wars by the use of U.N. diplomacy missions, peacekeeping operations and sanctions.

The mistaken perception, the report argues, is that Africa has been the center of many conflicts, but since 1946 it calculated that Myanmar, the former Burma, experienced 232 wars with neighbors, followed by India with 156, Israel with 79, Britain with 77 and France with 66.

The study, its sponsors say, will be annual. It was produced by the Human Security Center at the University of British Columbia. It argues all forms of political violence, except international terrorism, have declined worldwide since the early 1990s.

The report was paid for by the governments of Britain, Canada, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland and is the result of three years studying data compiled by research institutions and of a poll on popular attitudes to security in 10 countries.

The reason for the report came about when Andrew Mark, director of the Human Security Center, was working at the United Nations during the 1990s and noticed an absence of any reliable data to determine whether wars, mass slaughters of civilians or human rights abuses were increasing or decreasing around the world, he said.

"The global media gave front-page coverage to new wars, but mostly ignored the large number of existing conflicts that quietly ended," Mark said. "Neither the United Nations nor any other international organization collected data on wars, genocides, terrorism and violent abuses of human rights. This is still the case more than five years later."

Mark added while there was a wealth of data to make up for the absence of official statistics, "much of this material is highly technical and inaccessible to non-specialists, it has provided a solid based for the Human Security Report."

The report also challenged widely held myths about wars such as wars are getting deadlier, genocides are increasing, women are the primary victims of war, and there are 300,000 child soldiers worldwide.

The report said none of these figures was based on reliable data but they often flourished in the absence of official figures and through a misunderstanding of the term armed conflict. One example is that while women can be raped during a conflict, it is usually the men who are killed.

According to the report, international terrorism was the only form of political violence that appears to be getting worse.

Some datasets showed an overall decline in international terrorist incidents of all types since the early 1980s, but the most recent statistics suggest a dramatic increase in the number of high-casualty attacks since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, the report said. The U.S. National Counterterrorism Center released data in April showing terror attacks had increased from 175 attacks in 2003 to 651 in 2004; the total casualty toll was nearly 9,000.

The report argued for policymakers to consider human security or the protection of individuals, stating that during the past 100 years far more people have been killed by their own governments than by foreign armies and current violent conflicts - 95 percent of the current conflicts -- are within states.

The greatest number of fatalities does not come from fighting, it said, but from war-exacerbated disease and malnutrition. These deaths can account for as much as 90 percent of the total war-related death toll.

Data was insufficient to make even rough estimations of global or regional death toll trends from various conflicts.

There are 60 armed conflicts raging around the world and the United Nations has 82,000 military peacekeepers deployed, six times as many as in 1999.

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