Why War is Killing Less of Us Than Ever — A Paradox Explained

Violence

and war.

The insane brutality of ISIS continues,

the Russians are invading Ukraine,

and the Palestinians and Israelis

continue to slug it out.

Does that make you feel gloomy?

Well,

don't.

Because if you look at the numbers,

war actually seems

to be going out of fashion,

while the global population

is at an all time high.

It seems that we live

in the most peaceful period

in human history.

How is this possible?

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As of September 2014,

there were 4 conflicts going on

in the world that'd caused at least

10,000 people to die since January 2013,

9 conflicts that killed

more than 1,000 people,

and 13 that killed

more than 100 since January 2013.

Not really peaceful,

but consider this:

of all the conflicts going on,

none is an active war between countries.

They are either civil wars

or local conflicts.

Although civil wars are terrible

and cause huge suffering,

their impact is usually way smaller

than a war between nations or empires.

When two nations engage in war,

they can mobilise much bigger forces,

have access to all of the state's

resources and logistics, and

almost all of the population.

So why have we transitioned from

wars between nation states

to civil wars?

A lot of it is to do with

colonialism and the Cold War.

When the Cold War ended, a major driver of

armed conflict vanished too.

But the break up of the

communist dictatorships

revealed new or old tensions

and brought new conflicts

in the now freed state

which often resulted in civil war.

Much more importantly,

in 1945,

nearly all of Africa, much of Asia,

and parts of Latin America

were under colonial rule.

By 1990,

all but a few islands were independent.

But wait.

Couldn't you argue that what today's

multinational corporations

are doing in the third world

is just as bad as colonialism?

Let's look at Congo.

It was established as a colony in 1885

by the Belgium king.

An area 80 times the size of Belgium.

Violence committed against

the indigenous Congolese

and the ruthless system of

economic exploitation

had killed about half of the population

by 1908.

About 10 million Congolese were executed

or starved to death.

Millions were mutilated and traumatised.

The economic exploitation of the Congo

remained the top priority,

and forced labor never really ceased

completely until the end of Belgium rule

in 1960.

Which is not really that long ago.

So, no.

Colonialism was much worse than

vulture capitalism is today,

and it ended just two generations ago.

Most of the conflicts

that are going on right now

are in areas that 60 years ago

were under foreign control.

But things are getting better.

Until 1989,

victory for one side in a civil war

was common,

while nowadays victories are much rarer.

At the same time,

negotiated endings have jumped from 10%

to almost 40%.

What about the rest of the world?

Why have nation states

stopped attacking each other?

There are 4 major reasons:

One.

Democratisation.

The steady development

from autocracy to democracy.

Democracies hardly ever fight each other.

Of all the state against state wars

fought since 1900, only a minority

were fought between democracies.

Two.

Globalisation.

War is just not as effective at achieving

economic goals as it used to be.

Today it's almost always cheaper

to buy resources on the global market

than to seize them by force.

People from other nations are

more valuable to us alive than dead.

Which, overall, is a pretty new concept.

Three.

War is so 20th century.

Until World War I, warfare was seen as an

inevitable part of the human experience

and as a valuable tool which you could use

to achieve goals when diplomacy

hit a brick wall.

Today we have rules that declare acts of

aggression illegal and stipulate that

armed forces is only justified in

self-defence or with the authority of the

UN Security Council.

These rules are still broken, but today

it's harder to do so without sparking

opposition and disapproval.

Also, we have an international court for

war crimes in the Hague,

and that's a very recent innovation.

Four.

Borders are mostly fixed now.

After World War II,

territorial wars generally stopped

when most countries pledged to accept

international borders

and respect other nations' autonomy.

But is all of this just an anomaly,

or are we on the road to lasting peace?

Truth is,

we don't know yet.

We need a big enough sample to rule out

the historical average, which is about

one or two big wars per century.

We just haven't had enough time since

World War II to rule out the possibility

that war is not going away.

If we don't have one major war

in the next 75 years,

we can be really confident

that humanity is changing.

So, you see, war might be over.

Yes, there are nasty conflicts

going on in many places, but overall,

things are getting better.

And we can make them even better

by speaking up for peace and democracy.