The BBC has an article on its web site, also reported on the radio (BBC via NPR), that highlights a rather remarkable turn of events in the last 10 years:
Wars 'less frequent, less deadly'
The report credits the UN with helping reduce conflict
Wars around the world are both less frequent and less deadly since the end of the Cold War, a new report claims.The Human Security Report found a decline in every form of political violence except terrorism since 1992.
"A lot of the data we have in this report is extraordinary," its director, former UN official Andrew Mack, said.
It found the number of armed conflicts had fallen by more than 40% in the past 13 years, while the number of very deadly wars had fallen by 80%.
The study says many common beliefs about contemporary conflict are "myths" - such as that 90% of those killed in current wars are civilians, or that women are disproportionately victimised.
The report credits intervention by the United Nations, plus the end of colonialism and the Cold War, as the main reasons for the decline in conflict.
Interestingly enough, the article takes a slightly more balanced, and more accurate, look at the UN's role in this phenomenon:
Owen Greene, director of the Centre for International Co-operation and Security at Bradford University in the UK, called it "a very significant contribution".
....
But he cast doubt on its praise for the United Nations, saying the international body had been more successful at preventing conflicts from resuming than starting in the first place.
"Its record in preventing large-scale conflict has been rather poor," he said.
Apparently, since 1946, the UK and France have been involved in the most wars, followed by the US and USSR/Russia. (Could France and the UK be greater dangers to world peace than America and Israel? Someone better tell the Europeans.) Most conflicts today are civil wars and are of less lethality to civilians than past conflicts:
The fall in the number of deaths per conflict is due to a change from large-scale war between huge armies with heavy weaponry to low-intensity conflicts that "pit weak government forces against ill-trained rebels.
This all seems like very good news, but it raises a question: If the UN's influence is not the major factor in the decline of open warfare, and the decline has been especially pronounced over the last 13 years, does anyone want to take a stab at guessing where the responsibility for this welcome change might lie?
I would suggest two possibilities:
1) With the fall of the expansionist, imperialist, communist, USSR, there has been less "big power" competition and less reliance on proxy wars. One beneficial outcome, in particular, has been in the Middle East. With the Arab states no longer guaranteed a backer for their aggression and for re-arming after a war, they have been left to their own devices and have not dared to risk a war with Israel.
2) Perhaps most importantly, the United States is not an expansionist, imperialist power, despite the desperate claims and hysterical charges from the left. We are the biggest kid on the block, we generally want people to "play fair" and if anyone tries to bully anyone else, we can step in to make people behave themselves. We have some pretty good friends who agree with us on how the rules ought to be applied and they have done some pretty good work themselves.
And maybe, just maybe, the human race is growing up...
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Update I: Wretchard is now on the case and has looked into the report with some further detail.
Update II: Ben from liberal hawks writes:
This isn't news to military analysts, its old history. This has been the direction of things for a thousand years. The UN has nothing to do with it, it has everything to do with development in ethics, tactics, and technology.
Here's a summary of casualty rates since 1600AD: Down, steadily, except for brief spikes when improvements in battlefield tactics lagged behind improvements in firepower. But the trend is down, down, down.
_http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/gabrmetz/table1.gif_Wars are becoming less destructive to civilians, too. 20,000 French civilians died in the Normandy Campaign- but even this was lighter than historic civilian casualties. In "pre-enlightened" societies, pillage and rape is considered the right of the soldier. This hasn't been the case in the West in a long time. And Famine and Pestilence no longer follow along behind War- at least when that war is being conducted by a Western nation. They've gone their
seperate ways.
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