An End to War II

I was thinking more about this post, particularly after a denialist tried to argue that we hadn't got rid of war so we'd never beat climate change so we shouldn't even try.

Two points are hardly enough to demonstrate a long term downward trend in warfare. However, to plot the number of wars occurring around the world each year is a big job.

But I think we can make the case by looking at a decadal scale and moving away from my focus on the numbers of conflicts to look at the proportion of the global population killed. Unless 2009 turns out to be a very bad year it is clear that the naughties will be the least warlike decade for a very, very long time.

Consider. Since 2000 (inclusive) the numbers killed in wars around the world are under 6 million. This includes civilians who died from the more direct effects of war, but not the wider consequences of the misdirection of resources. Most of these were in the DRC, Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan and Somalia. All the other conflicts combined would account for less than a million because they were either brief, confined to small population areas or relatively low intensity. So unless 2009 is much worse than its predecessors the numbers killed for the decade will be less than 1 per 1000 people on the planet.

The 90s were worse. I don't have the figures, but the DRC, Somalia and Afghanistan were as bad or worse. Darfur is basically referred horrors from South Sudan The invasion of Kuwait and global response killed fewer people than the current Iraq war, but Rwanda makes up for that. And there were more sites for medium-sized wars, such as the former Yugoslavia, Algeria, Angola and the Liberia/Sierra Leone conflagarations.

The 80s were worse yet. The Iran-Iraq war probably led the pack, but various conflicts in Central America, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Angola, Mozambique and Peru meant the death toll would have been larger than over the last ten years, divided by a smaller population.

However, it is when you get back to the 70s that things really go to pot. We don't have to argue over whether Pol Pot's killing of his own population meets my definition of experiencing war to see that the death toll was far worse. For a start there were events in Cambodia that clearly do meet the definition. But Bangladesh, being so much bigger was probably worse. The various Portugese colonies did not win their independence without bloodshed, and civil wars followed in Angola and Mozambique, while in East Timor the Indonesians reduced the population by a third. The Vietnam war saw a considerable portion of its casualties, and there were events such as the Yom Kippur War to keep the body count ticking over.

In the 1960s the Vietnam conflict alone would come close to have killed 0.1% of the global population, but if that's not enough there was the Congo Crisis, Biafra, The Six day War and all sorts of horrors in Indonesia.

The Korean War may not have been quite as bloody as Vietnam, but it certainly outranked any modern conflict. Meanwhile, almost 200,000 died so Algeria could get its independence, mostly in the 50s. Tibet was invaded, various African states had to fight for their independence and the Vietnamese were doing the same.

I don't think I need to discuss the 40s, but the 30s included quite a lot of events we now think of as part of World War II, such as the Japanese invasion of China and Italian occupation of Ethiopia. I think there was a bit of conflict in Spain at the time was well.

I could go on, but all this bloodshed is pretty grim, and I think the point is made. In each of the decades I have listed a small portion of the wars that actually occurred, yet the ones I have included added up to a larger number of casualties, adjusted for population, than we have seen this decade. Nothing going on in Gaza is likely to shift that.

Another way of making the same case would be to consider that at the moment only about 10% of the nations on Earth are experiencing war, and since they're generally smaller to medium sized nations, the proportion of the global population is even smaller. On the other hand, on the definition I used Australia experienced war for about a third of its first 72 years, and we're not usually thought of as a war-wracked country.

War is on its way out, and only environmental catastrophe, or a major spread in nuclear weapons, is likely to bring it back.

It might be argued that with the death toll having fallen globally to one person in ten thousand per year that war really isn't doing that much damage any more, and any benefits from further decline will be swallowed up through overpopulation or environmental disasters. This is possible, but the direct casualties of war really are the tip of a very large iceberg. Eisenhower's speech about the costs of military expenditure are as true now as they were then. At the moment wars are still sufficiently common that most people accept these costs, but if they continue to decline there will come a point where people really will demand the beating of swords into plowshares. The benefits unleashed will be easily enough to feed the world and protect the environment, if we use them wisely.