Does Peace Have a Chance?Wars are less deadly than they've been for 12,000 years. Things could get even better.
Posted Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2009, at 2:03 PM ET
The West Point War Museum, right across the Hudson River from my home, offers a brisk tour of the history of weaponry, from Paleolithic stone axes to Fat Man, the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. A sign at the museum's entrance states, "Unquestionably, war-making is an aspect of human nature which will continue as nations attempt to impose their will upon each other." Actually, this assertion is quite questionable. A recent decline in war casualties—especially compared to historical and even prehistorical rates—has some scholars wondering whether the era of international war may be ending.
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StumbleUponCounting casualties is fraught with uncertainty; scholars' estimates vary according to how they define war and what sources they accept as reliable, among other factors. Nevertheless, a clear trend emerges from recent studies. Last year, 25,600 combatants and civilians were killed as a direct result of armed conflicts, according to the 2009 Yearbook of SIPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, to be released Aug. 17. Two thirds of these deaths took place in just three trouble spots: Sri Lanka (8,400), Afghanistan (4,600), and Iraq (4,000). In contrast, almost 500,000 people are killed each year in violent crimes and well over 1 million die in automobile accidents.
SIPRI's figure excludes deaths from "one-sided conflict," in which combatants deliberately kill unarmed civilians, and "indirect" deaths from war-related disease and famine. If these casualties are included, annual war-related deaths from 2004 to 2007 rise tenfold to 250,000 per year, according to "The Global Burden of Armed Violence," a 2008 report published by an international organization set up in the aftermath of the Geneva Declaration. Even this much higher number, the report states, is "remarkably low in comparison to historical figures."
For example, Milton Leitenberg of the University of Maryland's School for International and Security Studies has estimated that war and state-sponsored genocide in the first half of the 20th century killed as many as 190 million people, both directly and indirectly. That comes to an average of 3.8 million deaths per year. His analysis found that wars killed fewer than one-quarter of that total in the second half of the 20th century—40 million altogether, or 800,000 per year.
Even these staggering figures are low in comparison with prehistoric ones, if considered as a percentage of population. All the horrific wars and genocides of the 20th century accounted for less than 3 percent of all deaths worldwide, according to one estimate. That is much less than the probable rate of violent death among our early ancestors.
The economist Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute recently analyzed dozens of archaeological and ethnographic studies of hunter-gatherer societies like the ones our ancestors are thought to have lived in for most of our prehistory. Warfare and other forms of violence led to 14 percent of the deaths in these simple societies, Bowles concludes.
In his influential book War Before Civilization, the anthropologist Lawrence Keeley of the University of Illinois estimates that violence accounted for as many as 25 percent of all deaths among early societies. Keeley includes not only hunter-gatherers but also tribal societies such as the Yanomamo in Amazonia and the Enga in New Guinea, which practice simple horticulture as well as hunting. These early people racked up such murderous totals with clubs, spears, and arrows rather than machine guns and bombs—and Keeley's stats don't even include indirect deaths from famine and disease.
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Education - in which I include the global proliferation of mass media, rather than the limited activities of the classroom - has given 95% of the world's population a pretty clear idea of how previous conflicts began, and how to avoid those kinds of conflicts in the future.
Some say that the only thing that history teaches you is that history doesn't teach you anything. But this is not true. Once upon a time a charismatic, visionary regime with uniforms designed by Hugo Boss could whip millions of people into doing unspeakable things. But try it in the 21st Century, and people will call you Adolf Hitler.
Hats off also to the international system of nation states, each with their accepted borders, national security policies, insignia and laws. A few don't work, but most offer a much improved form of security and peace than that offered by tribe or kingdom.
And a salute to the United States, which has performed the role of global policeman better than the British did before them. And, arcing back to my first point, the US - Hollywood in particular, has been very good at increasing global awareness of the horrors of war and how these horrors arise.
-- GreenwichJ
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It's because we live in a one superpower world (and a mostly benign super power at that) and the fact that globalization has happened, war has thankfully become ever more obsolete. Countries which act aggressively outside of their borders are punished by the large markets of North America and Western Europe, the US encourages most countries to stay in line, and countries depend on each other ever more for goods in trade - war has become largely unprofitable.
Also, from a developed nation stand point, the US Military dominance has made in attempting to fight us with force simply suicidal. And, since nations which are significantly hostile to us such can't win on the battle field, they will take their fight to the UN or the airwaves to beat us there (France is particularly good at this). We will have to become much, much savvier to effectively win the new wars of the 21st Century.
-- headhunt33
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