INTRODUCTION

In December 2011, Mitch Landrieu, the mayor of New Orleans, said that ‘a student attending John McDonogh [one of the city's high schools] was more likely to be killed than a soldier in Afghanistan’ (Robertson, 2011). His assessment, while partly rhetorical, pointed to an uncomfortable truth. With a homicide rate of 51 victims per 100,000 population, New Orleans residents faced greater risks than the populations of such war-torn countries as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (32 homicides per 100,000), Somalia (30 per 100,000), and Afghanistan (21 per 100,000) (Gilgen, 2011, p. 53). As counterintuitive as it may seem, fatalities due to armed violence in non-conflict settings account for the overwhelming majority of violent deaths worldwide. Between 2004 and 2009, an average of 526,000 people died violently each year, but only 10 per cent of them qualified as direct conflict deaths (p. 70).

International attention, however, has traditionally focused on interstate or civil wars. Violence that is not captured by the terms ‘armed conflict’ or ‘post-conflict’—and that does not violate international human rights law-is normally left to the relevant country to address as best it can. However, many states simply are not able to tackle the entrenched forms of non-conflict armed violence that affect them. The resulting human and economic costs to societies-and the frequent erosion of the state's legitimacy and monopoly on the use of force-have triggered a rethink of international and national policies designed to address armed violence.