Decline of War: Why this isn’t News

War has fallen on hard times. Worldwide, the number of wars has been declining for fifteen years. As Greg Easterbrook reports in New Republic, major news media have almost completely overlooked this story. (You could have read it in this blog on August 30, 2004.)

This is bad news both for antiwar liberals and pro-military conservatives. They will now have to look for some other way to get their adrenalin highs from being continuously outraged. It is bad news for the major TV and print media which depend on sensationalized reporting to deliver eyeballs to the advertisers.

During the 20th century the average person had a 1-2 percent change of dying in a war or for war related causes. The odds are now 0.005 percent.

Global military spending has declined.

What is left for poor church leaders to do? Preach the gospel and reform their own institutions and lives?

Of course, fifteen years is a too short a time for us to be sure of a trend. Technology has changed the nature of warfare - this may explain why we have gone over 50 years without a war between great powers. War may return, but it is more likely that we will see an era of continuing low level violence in the form of terrorism.

New Republic requires registration. If you don’t want to do that, here are a few extended quotes from Easterbrook’s fine article.

"Combat in Iraq and in a few other places is an exception to a significant global trend that has gone nearly unnoticed--namely that, for about 15 years, there have been steadily fewer armed conflicts worldwide. In fact, it is possible that a person's chance of dying because of war has, in the last decade or more, become the lowest in human history."

"Five years ago, two academics--Monty Marshall, research director at the Center for Global Policy at George Mason University, and Ted Robert Gurr, a professor of government at the University of Maryland--spent months compiling all available data on the frequency and death toll of twentieth-century combat, expecting to find an ever-worsening ledger of blood and destruction. Instead, they found, after the terrible years of World Wars I and II, a global increase in war from the 1960s through the mid-'80s. But this was followed by a steady, nearly uninterrupted decline beginning in 1991. They also found a steady global rise since the mid-'80s in factors that reduce armed conflict--economic prosperity, free elections, stable central governments, better communication, more "peacemaking institutions," and increased international engagement. Marshall and Gurr, along with Deepa Khosla, published their results as a 2001 report, Peace and Conflict, for the Center for International Development and Conflict Management at the University of Maryland. At the time, I remember reading that report and thinking, "Wow, this is one of the hottest things I have ever held in my hands." I expected that evidence of a decline in war would trigger a sensation. Instead it received almost no notice." (emphasis added)

"First, the numbers. The University of Maryland studies find the number of wars and armed conflicts worldwide peaked in 1991 at 51, which may represent the most wars happening simultaneously at any point in history. Since 1991, the number has fallen steadily. There were 26 armed conflicts in 2000 and 25 in 2002, even after the Al Qaeda attack on the United States and the U.S. counterattack against Afghanistan. By 2004, Marshall and Gurr's latest study shows, the number of armed conflicts in the world had declined to 20, even after the invasion of Iraq. All told, there were less than half as many wars in 2004 as there were in 1991. "