Is the world becoming more violent, or does it just seem that way?
Yes, the gruesome scenes from Gaza and Ukraine, not to mention less-covered but still deadly conflicts from Myanmar to Sudan to Haiti, paint a picture of a world on fire. Yes, we just experienced a moment when a country with nuclear weapons (Pakistan) was hit by a missile strike from a bordering country (Iran). But it’s also true that media coverage of deadly global events can obscure more positive long-term global trends.
Until recently, there was a good case to be made that we were living through just such a trend. The period since the end of World War II has been referred to as the “long peace” for the historically anomalous absence of interstate war. And this wasn’t just a fortunate accident — around a decade ago, books such as Harvard psychologist Stephen Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature and international relations scholar Joshua Goldstein’s Winning the War on War argued that traditional armed conflict was becoming obsolete.
For Americans, the first decade of the 21st century may have been dominated by the 9/11 attacks and the bloody and controversial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but by some measures, it was one of the most peaceful periods in recorded history, with fewer recorded battlefield deaths than the world had seen in a century. (Even American losses in the war on terror were small compared to the worst of US history — a little more than 7,000 US service members were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined, fewer than half the number killed in World War II’s Battle of the Bulge.)
In the decade that followed, due largely to the raging conflict in Syria, the number of civilian and military deaths in state-based conflicts around the world climbed from just over 25,000 in 2011 to just short of 116,000 in 2014, according to data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program and Peace Research Institute Oslo. But that’s still lower than many years in the 1970s…
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