New Peace
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We live in one of the most peaceful times. Violence seems to decrease over time, but with upticks in recent years. Let’s hope this is not a reversal of the general trend.
I am a very positive human. Therefore, I never subscribed to any notion that “the world is getting worse and worse every year” or that “war, terror and tragedy are everywhere”. But for a long time in my life, I didn’t think about violence on a world-wide scale and how it changes. I thought the trend must therefore be constant.
Reading Factfulness by Hans Rosling1 and then a few years later Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker2, I changed my mind. My belief was that we were living in the most peaceful times humanity has ever experienced. Steven Pinker refers to this era as:
The “New Peace” is the term Steven Pinker uses to describe the post–Cold War decline in “organized conflicts of all kinds—civil wars, genocides, repression by autocratic governments, and terrorist attacks.”
page 25, Part I Capter 1 section "The New Peace" from the "Human Security Report 2013"
There are good reasons for thinking that we live in The New Peace era:
Claims that the number of interstate wars has decreased dramatically since the 1950s, and that civil war numbers have declined since the end of the Cold War, are now uncontroversial within the mainstream conflict research community, though they still occasion surprise and sometimes skepticism among non-specialists.
page 3, Part I section "Contested Claims" from the "Human Security Report 2013"
Furthermore, data up until 2012 is compatible with the hope that this is a continuing trend.
Chapter 1 reports on a remarkable recent statistical study by the Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO) that found that if current trends in key structural variables are sustained, the proportion of the world’s countries afflicted by civil wars will halve by 2050. Such an outcome is far from certain, of course, and for reasons that have yet to be imagined, as well as those canvassed by the conflict pessimists. But, thanks in substantial part to Steven Pinker’s extraordinary research, there are now compelling reasons for believing that the historical decline in violence is both real and remarkably large—and also that the future may well be less violent than the past.
page 11, Part I section "Taking Stock and Looking Ahead" from the "Human Security Report 2013"
Recently, I had many very fruitful discussions with a friend who is a medical doctor. I value her highly. She suggested evaluating my belief again with the current data including recent wars. So let’s look at the live data from “Our World in Data”.
And yes, since 2020 we see an increase of deaths world-wide. Putting this into perspective, armed conflict is still a very rare cause of death in most years and countries, Our World in Data writes:
Globally, close to 80,000 people died due to fighting in armed conflicts in 2019.
This means conflicts caused around 1 in 700 deaths.
[…]
Armed conflict is a much rarer cause of death than non-communicable (in blue) or infectious diseases (in red). It is also less common than other causes of violent death: more than five times as many people died from homicides in 2019, and almost ten times as many from suicide.
Yet, the number of conflict deaths can change a lot from year to year — in 2005, fewer than 20,000 people died in armed conflicts, while in 1994, in the wake of the genocide in Rwanda, it was more than 800,000. During the two World Wars, armed conflict was a leading cause of death, with several million deaths per year.
In 2022, Steven Pinker published an opinion piece on Russia’s war against Ukraine. He notes that no one can predict the future and the continued trend towards peace is not written in stone. However, there are a few regulating factors like globalization (Russia is dependent on the world) or the ongoing humanitarion revolution and its decimation of barbaric customs one of which is war. Pinker writes:
For these and other reasons, even when countries have breached the Long Peace, the invasions have seldom gone well for the invader.
Is Russia's war with Ukraine the end of the Long Peace? by Steven Pinker
Let’s hope he’s right and turn to a more positive trend in the data. If we look at the inter-state relationships, we get a positive picture:
While every war is a tragedy, the data suggests that fewer people died in conflicts in recent decades than in most of the 20th century. Countries have also built more peaceful relations between and within them.
Our World in Data: War and Peace
→ Thus I conclude for now, that we live in a very peaceful time and there seems to be a trend towards more peace rather more violence. We can’t be sure about this, but I hope that recent upticks in violence are fluctuations and not a reversal of a trend. I should revisit this belief regularly to look at new data.