Beyond definition: violence in a global perspective

While conceptualising violence -- in either minimalist or comprehensive understandings -- has posed significant problems for scholars, the problem of measuring or quantifying it has been equally challenging for both researchers and policy makers. This article examines the best available current evidence on the ‘global burden of armed violence’ and highlights what we know and do not know about the scope, scale, and distribution of different forms of violence worldwide, especially what policy makers have called ‘armed violence’ (the minimalist conception). It also examines the definitional and conceptual constraints that challenge any attempt to develop cross-national and cross-cultural comparisons, and the limitations of existing data, and brings the empirical evidence to bear on the conceptual debates that animate this volume. Finally, it raises some questions concerning the way in which the different forms that violence takes may (or may not) be linked, and the issues this raises for future ‘global’ comparisons.