Overview

For civilians in conflict-affected countries, the year 2024 was marked by a string of increasingly bleak new records. The UN recorded more than 36,000 civilian conflict deaths, a 10 percent increase over the already record-high numbers in 2023 (33,443). Children faced unprecedented violence in conflict zones, largely due to Israel’s war against Hamas in the occupied Palestinian Territory (oPT). Journalist deaths in conflicts reached the highest figure in decades, while more aid workers were killed than ever before—the overwhelming majority of them national staff. More people were killed or injured by explosive weapons in 2024 than in any year since at least 2010, while the highest number of healthcare personnel were killed in 2024 since records first began being systematically collected. Against this backdrop, global displacement levels also reached an all-time high, with more than 123 million people forced to flee their homes by the end of 2024.

Beyond these trends, civilians continued to suffer the often-devastating secondary effects of conflicts. This included long-lasting physical injuries, mental trauma, and lack of access to food, education, healthcare, and other basic services—particularly where high-intensity violence laid waste to schools, hospitals, and other civilian infrastructure. Several armed actors were also accused of using starvation as a deliberate tactic in warfare in 2024, while conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) was widespread and even worsened in many countries. Access to justice and other remedies remained elusive for most survivors. This intensifying violence came in a year that, paradoxically, also marked two major milestones in global efforts to better protect civilians in conflict. The 75th anniversary of the Geneva Conventions took place in 2024. The year also represented 25 years since the United Nations Security Council first began to recognize protection of civilians as a matter of international peace and security.

CIVIC’s Civilian Protection Index captured 2024’s worsening global outlook. The index, included with this annual report for the second year in a row, helps shed light on the level of protection civilians experience in 163 countries across the globe. The index comprises 15 indicators that measure aspects of protection—including direct and indirect measures of violence like civilian deaths, sexual violence, and the number of firearms circulating among the population—as well as attributes of protective environments, such as trust in government institutions and the quality of civic space. For this year’s report, CIVIC also analyzed data dating back to 2020, allowing the index to capture both developments in 2024 and longer-term trends.

The data revealed that civilians in Afghanistan, Myanmar, North Korea, the oPT, Russia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen faced the worst protection environments globally in 2024. The protection environment deteriorated the most in the oPT, Mozambique, Burkina Faso, Lebanon, and Russia from 2023 to 2024. Different factors influence the negative scores in these countries. Burkina Faso, Myanmar, the oPT, and Sudan all experienced among the highest levels of civilian casualties, while in Russia, the low score primarily reflects a lack of trust in governmental institutions and the dire state of independent media and civil society. This explains, for example, why Russia ranked lower than Ukraine on the index, despite the intense conflict and significant levels of civilian casualties per capita in Ukraine.

Over the longer term, since 2020, the civilian protection environment has worsened in all the regions monitored (see Figure 1 above), while the situations in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Myanmar, the oPT, and Sudan deteriorated the most. This reflects the growing numbers of civilian casualties and, in the case of Afghanistan, the abrupt takeover by the Taliban—an authoritarian regime imposing severe restrictions on individual rights, particularly for women and girls. Since 2020, all indicators measured by CIVIC have worsened, except those that measure trust in state institutions (see Figure 2).

Conversely, according to the Index, civilians enjoyed the strongest protection environment in Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Ireland, Lithuania, Norway, Senegal, Sweden, Switzerland, and Timor-Leste. More in-depth analysis of trends highlighted by the index is included throughout this report, while individual country situations can be explored through the interactive map. The inclusion of some countries with mixed human rights records in this category can be at least partially explained by the Index’s reliance on subjective civilian opinion survey data, which can include civilians with lower expectations for government institutions sometimes rating these institutions more positively than those with higher expectations. Countries that are relatively stable but still receive peacebuilding aid are also elevated based on CIVIC’s inclusion of a Peacebuilding Aid Receipt indicator.

Beyond the situation in individual countries, technological advances continued to rapidly reshape modern battlefields in 2024, bringing new challenges for safeguarding civilians. Warring parties increasingly relied on Artificial Intelligence (AI), including unpiloted aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, and other autonomous weapons systems. The use of AI decision-support systems (DSS) came under particular scrutiny, largely due to Israel’s reported use of such systems to identify thousands of suspected Hamas-linked targets in Gaza with minimal human oversight. Drones are also become an increasingly common feature of modern battlefields, with ACLED recording some 19,700 drone strikes in 2024, a staggering increase of more than 4,000 percent from 2020 as combatants increasingly deploy small, commercially available drones rather than costly state-sponsored models. Countries, including Russia, were accused of using small, first-person view drones to unlawfully attack civilians and spread terror among populations in Ukraine, sparking debate about how to better regulate such weapons.

Private military and security companies (PMSCs) operated in many conflict contexts in 2024, where they were sometimes accused of violations against civilians. International efforts to better regulate PSMCs made incremental progress during the year, although such efforts were complicated by the fact that several PMSCs have become de facto extensions of state power, placing them in a legal gray area. With global temperatures rising in 2024, the effects of climate change continued to both fuel conflict and heighten protection risks for civilians. In Sudan, for example, armed violence and climate factors contributed to famine being declared in parts of the country. At the same time, harmful misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, and hate speech (MDMH) were ubiquitous in many conflicts, often targeting humanitarian actors in a way that placed both relief efforts and the civilians reliant on them at risk.

With 130 conflicts active across the globe in 2024, some were fought away from the global spotlight despite high levels of civilian suffering. The consequences of a conflict becoming chronically neglected can be significant, as this brings less diplomatic, political, and humanitarian engagement, with civilians paying the price. There were several examples of this in 2024. The intensifying conflict in Sudan, for example, continued to be overshadowed by the situations in the oPT and Ukraine, despite a staggering civilian death toll and the worst displacement numbers in the world. In this report, CIVIC also highlights how rampant gang violence in Haiti has led to thousands of deaths and a humanitarian crisis that is perilously underfunded. The UN Security Council, despite meeting a record number of times in 2024, often failed to spotlight the hidden violence in such under-recognized conflicts.

International efforts to stem the rising tide of violence against civilians had, at best, mixed results in 2024. UN peacekeeping efforts continued to move towards leaner missions with often reduced protection mandates, even in situations where civilian protection concerns remained high. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), MONUSCO completed its withdrawal from South Kivu province, but the government requested that its full withdrawal be postponed due to escalating violence by armed groups. In Mali, the security situation for civilians deteriorated during the first half of 2024 following MINUSMA’s abrupt withdrawal in late 2023, although the situation stabilized toward the end of the year. This report highlights how peacekeeping mission withdrawals, if not managed correctly, can lead to perilous protection gaps for civilians, particularly when regional and local actors can lack the capacity and resources of UN-mandated entities.

While impunity too often remains the norm for violations against civilians, there were also notable developments toward accountability in some contexts in 2024. The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants against Israeli and Hamas officials for various crimes against humanity and war crimes, including the Court’s first-ever explicit recognition of starvation as a war crime. The ICC prosecutor also requested an arrest warrant against Myanmar military leader Min Aung Hlaing during the year, although it has yet to be officially granted by the Court’s judges. This report also highlights how international justice activists are increasingly making use of universal jurisdiction (UJ) to combat impunity, with a 33 percent rise in such cases just between 2022 and 2024. In 2024, a Swiss court convicted a former Gambian official for various crimes against humanity in a widely publicized case, while in Argentina, a UJ case on the Rohingya genocide led to arrest warrants against Myanmar military and civilian officials.

Some efforts to strengthen international legal frameworks and other standards to better protect civilians in conflict moved forward in 2024, although many observers raised concerns about the slow pace of these processes. In December, the UN General Assembly voted to begin formal negotiations on a new international convention on crimes against humanity, which rights groups have long campaigned for. The UN General Assembly passed a resolution on AI while the UN Secretary-General reiterated his call on states to negotiate a legally binding treaty on lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) by 2026. However, no significant progress was made toward negotiating such a treaty. At the national level, several countries – including Iraq, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Ukraine, the US, and Yemen – took various steps to better operationalize protection of civilians and integrate civilian harm mitigation and response (CHMR) measures across their armed forces in whole or in part. For example, Yemeni military and security leadership from several governorates signed a POC Code of Conduct Policy and, with support from CIVIC, established an implementation plan for the policy that will include widespread dissemination, strengthened oversight, and community involvement in oversight and implementation.

However, there was backsliding on other international legal commitments. In one such instance, intense debate erupted on military assistance to Ukraine, with many European states voicing support for the transfer of anti-personnel landmines from the US to Ukraine, even though their transfer and use is prohibited by the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production, and Transfer of Anti-Personel Mines (Ottawa Convention). Data also indicated increased production, transfer, and use of cluster munitions in 2024, despite an international convention prohibiting their use. According to the Cluster Munitions Monitor, all 314 recorded casualties caused by cluster munitions in 2024 were civilians, and 42 percent of them were children.¹

This report does not just aim to capture trends in civilian harm in 2024, but also to set out concrete steps international and national actors should take to reverse these trends. This Executive Summary is followed by a Roadmap for Action with recommendations for States, the UN Security Council and General Assembly, UN peacekeeping operations, as well as regional organizations such as the African Union. Most of these recommendations mirror those outlined in CIVIC’s POC Trends report covering 2023, reflecting a lack of progress in 2024, and even regression in many areas.

The Recognize section of this report profiles conflict-affected regions of the world that are often neglected on the global stage and analyzes why some contexts with significant levels of civilian harm still receive less media attention, political engagement, and donor funding than others. Spotlight articles profile the situation in two such relatively neglected conflicts—in Haiti and Sudan—which both experienced sharply escalating levels of violence and displacement in 2024, as well as examining how the UN Security Council focused its attention during the year. The next section, Prevent, highlights trends in the use of AI, MDMH, and PSMCs on modern battlefields, as well as how the effects of climate change and conflict on protection concerns increasingly intersect. It also contains in-depth spotlight articles on the diffusion of drone technology in modern warfare, as well as on how climate change has exacerbated civilian harm and displacement in Nigeria’s northeastern Borno state. The Protect section provides an overview of key conflict trends in 2024 and how these impacted civilians, both directly and indirectly. Spotlight articles in this section cover: the situation in Somalia’s Lower Juba region, where the government launched an offensive against the NSAG al-Shabaab, prompting backlash against civilians; recent efforts to strengthen community-based protection (CBP) and CHMR efforts of militaries; the escalation in the use of explosive weapons and their devastating toll on civilians; as well as the protection risks stemming from abrupt withdrawals of UN peacekeeping missions. The final section, Amend, examines the reverberating impacts of wars of civilians, both while violence is ongoing and in post-conflict settings, as well as efforts to secure justice, reparations, or amends for conflict-related abuses. The spotlight articles focus on the current situation in Afghanistan where, despite a drop in casualty numbers, years of unaddressed harm are compounding alongside fresh violations to undermine civilian well-being, as well as on international justice efforts over the genocide against the Rohingya group in Myanmar.