SEESAC’s New Report Highlights Practical Strategies for Preventing Armed Violence
Armed violence has a substantial physical, social, and economic impact – globally and in the Western Balkans. As documented by SEESAC’s Armed Violence Monitoring Platform, it results in hundreds of deaths and injuries each year, with survivors often facing long-term health consequences.
Beyond the immediate harm, armed violence fuels insecurity, emotional distress, and trauma, disrupts community cohesion, and erodes quality of life. Firearm misuse in domestic violence remains a major concern and is a leading cause of firearm-related deaths in the region, with a significant number of femicides committed with firearms. Economically, armed violence incurs substantial costs related to medical care, law enforcement responses, lost productivity, and legal proceedings. Recent mass shootings have, once again, reignited debates around firearms control and underscored the necessity for comprehensive violence prevention strategies.
To help address this challenge, SEESAC has published a new report, Preventing Armed Violence: An Overview of Approaches and Practical Experiences.
By framing armed violence as a human rights issue, rather than solely a matter of criminal justice, the report provides a comprehensive mapping of interventions and synthesizes current global knowledge related to the prevention of armed violence.
It outlines a comprehensive, multifaceted framework for armed violence interventions that integrates:
- Criminal-legal system interventions, such as regulating availability, circulation, possession, use and transfers of firearms;
- Community-based interventions, including street outreach, risk education, public information and advocacy, and hospital-based programs; and
- Hybrid, collaborative interventions that combine criminal-legal and community resources, including focused deterrence and situational crime prevention.
The report emphasizes that effective prevention must go beyond conventional law enforcement strategies. An effective response to armed violence also requires a holistic approach to addressing the underlying social determinants that can drive it including, for example, limited access to education, employment opportunities, and support services for both survivors and individuals at risk of engaging in armed violence.
The report provides practical examples and guidance to policymakers, government officials, practitioners, and civil society organizations on targeted, evidence-based interventions that have been proven to reduce the scale and impact of armed violence.
Explore the full report on the following link.
This report was produced under the regional project 'Support for Enhancing the Fight Against the Illegal Possession, Misuse, and Trafficking of Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALW) in the Western Balkans', funded by the European Commission, Directorate-General for Neighbourhood and Enlargement Negotiations, through the Instrument for Pre-accession Assistance (IPA II). Through this project, SEESAC is supporting Western Balkan authorities in mainstreaming a gender perspective into SALW control measures.