Are we or aren't we living in an unprecedented era of conflict?
Is there unprecedented conflict today?
Having fallen between 1990 and 2007, the total number of conflicts worldwide began to rise in 2010, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program found. The number of civil and interstate wars, and the fatalities they cause, are now at their highest levels since the mid-1980s, and the UN declared in January that the number of violent conflicts worldwide is at its highest level since the end of World War II.
Aside from the Russian war in Ukraine, the rest of the world is a lot more peaceful than the headlines or Internet chatter would have you believe. Like most major trends, world peace just kind of sneaked up on everyone and a lot of people have not noticed. Thanks to modern tech, mainly ubiquitous access to cell phones and the Internet, any mayhem anywhere on the planet easily becomes another news item for a global audience. This gives the impression of more violence when it is nothing more than unprecedented general public access to news of violence that, until recently, was never broadcast worldwide and accompanied by video.
Mind you, it's a pretty big "aside from" raging inside Ukraine. But that is a major part of the death toll dragging the average way up, now.
Also, I find it hard to believe that the massive bloodshed in Congo (former Zaire) in the 1990s didn't perform a similar function distorting the statistics. Add in the Rwandan genocide that decade, too.
Maybe we're just getting better at counting the dead. Or pretending that inflated claims are data. Maybe social media lets a tiny minority of people interested in "their"
conflict give conflicts so much publicity that it seems like the world
must be aflame. Where there's digital smoke there must be fire. But given how few people intensively post online or the still-small number of people who read it, that just isn't true.
So what is it? More war or less war?
I suspect that conflict may be unprecedented in tenacity where it breaks out today but, "aside from" Ukraine, conflict is not piling up the body count of the Cold War era.
It may be less dangerous to non-participants/victims because during the Cold War there was incentive to clamp down and contain local conflict lest America and the USSR get involved and risk escalation to general nuclear war as trigger fingers got itchy on the inter-German border.
But I'm just guessing. What I won't guess at is that this plea for a UN-centered vision of a renewed peacemaking reflecting the UN Secretary-General's “A New Agenda for Peace” is futile:
To achieve this, creative and courageous leadership is needed from a broad coalition of politicians, business leaders, the UN, peace builders, and local communities—aligned with a renewed ambition to make peace.
All we need is "ambition to make peace"? I guess I'll repeat my 1990s era rebuke of the concept of "peace enforcement" to reject that courageous leadership for "making peace".
NOTE: The image was made from DALL-E.
NOTE: TDR Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.
NOTE: I'm adding updates on the Last Hamas War in this post.
