Explosive violence

Explosive violence involves the use of explosive weapons for the immediate purpose of creating harm to health or damage to physical assets.  Explosive violence is most commonly employed in circumstances of traditional warfare (conflict) and in certain acts of non-state political violence (commonly called ‘terrorist bombings’).

‘Explosive weapons’ include artillery shells, bombs (such as aircraft bombs, car bombs, suicide bombs), cluster munitions, grenades, landmines, mortars and rockets.  Such weapons use some combination of explosive blast and fragmentation in order to cause wounds to people or damage to physical assets such as vehicles or buildings.  A common feature of many such weapons is that the individual munition, if projected towards a target, does not need to strike the target directly but can cause harm by exploding in some proximity to it; this is a function of the blast radius and fragmentation effects of the munition.  Explosive weapons are a subset of ‘conventional weapons’ and overlap to an extent with ‘small arms and light weapons.’

World-wide, explosive violence results in large numbers of non-combatants being killed and injured every year. Modern conflict, where fighting by states is often undertaken amongst a non-combatant population and where the support of those people is (either explicitly or implicitly) part of the goal being fought for, creates serious challenges regarding the acceptability and strategic value of explosive violence.  At the same time, explosive violence by unaccountable entities and where no distinction is made between combatants and non-combatants, is a significant security threat in a growing number of countries.

Landmine Action is gathering data on explosive violence as an international public health phenomena.  Landmine Action is working for improved international policy and legal analysis of the parameters of explosive violence.

Richard Moyes, Policy & Research Director, Landmine Action, maintains an explosive violence blog commenting on the use of explosive weapons in crime and conflict.