This is an IHeart podcast.

I'm Maeve Higgins and this is Solvable.

Interviews with the world's most innovative thinkers working to solve the world's biggest problems.

My solvable is to find the ways to end civil armed conflicts and to find reconciliation.

That's Juan Manuel Santos, former president of Colombia, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016

for his role in ending more than 50 years of conflict in that country. Now, as you can tell from my

accent, I'm Irish. I grew up in the Republic of Ireland, which was far from the violence and

the terror happening up in Northern

Ireland at the time. And I was too young to vote in the referendum for the Good Friday Agreement,

which was this incredible development in the peace process between Ireland and Britain and

Northern Ireland. But I have to say, I remember so much relief and just such huge joy all over

the country when the agreement was ratified and the violence was over. Now, in Ireland, it hasn't

been a perfect peace, but certainly lives were saved and sanity was restored to this region that was in complete turmoil.

So I was reading this UN report and 100 years ago, whenever there was war, 90% of the casualties

were military personnel and 10% were civilians, mainly women and children. And now that number has totally reversed.

In a war today, 90% of casualties are civilians.

To understand how difficult it is to end a civil war or any armed conflict, really,

perhaps it's useful to look at the conflicts ongoing today.

There's this ongoing conflict mapping project. It's called the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project.

And this year, just up until May of 2019,

they reported over 8,000 deaths in places like India, Syria, Yemen and Nigeria.

And across the world, overall violence causes 1.6 million deaths every year.

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