War, the dark side of humanity

With the insane brutality of ISIS continues, the Palestinian and Israeli continues their fight and the Russians are invading Ukraine, does that make you uncomfortable?

Well, don`t, if you look it out death by war has drastically dropped, while the global population is at an all time high, it now seems that we life in the most peaceful period of human existence. How is all of this possible?

As you can see, the amount of people killed in a war has drastically decreased since the 1950s, this is part due to a more internationalized world and fighting is now so 19 century. 

While the fighting drops, the human population is at an all time high.

On the left is the major conflicts of the world that has taken 5000+ lives, while on the right is the ongoing conflict that has killed at least 100 lives. Not exactly peaceful, but consider this. Out of all the conflicts in the world today, none are an active war between countries. Instead they are civil war between factions or local conflicts. 

Although we have seen in Syria that civil war is indeed ugly and nasty, their impact is usually smaller than a war between two nations. A war between two states means that both states can mobilize all of their much bigger armed forces, have access to all the states resources and logistic and almost all of the population. The result would be a full blown war and might start the bridge for another world war.

But why has it gone from state vs state war to civil war?

Two words, the cold war and colonization.

As the world grew more and more humanized, colonialism was seen as a bad thing, and countries that had many colonies were forced to give them independence, either by force or diplomacy.

As the cold war dictatorships ended, this removed the only barrier from the point where old ethnic tension was hidden. With the dictator regime gone, the old "ethnic" tension appeared again. This has been seen in Yugoslavia, as Tito died, the strong central government of Yugoslavia got weaker and weaker, to the point where a civil war has sparked.

This is the same with "decolonization", as the "imperialist" government has been removed, old ethnic/religious tensions start again as may spark a civil war. So we can say that most conflict today are in countries, where 60 years ago, they were under foreign control.

But things are getting better!

Back then, a single side victory was much more common, now after 1990, negotiated ending has increased from 10% before 1990 to 60% after 1990.

Suddenly, why have nation states stop attacking each other?

I guess we can say that there are three major reasons for this.

1. Developement from Autocracy to Democracy

Democracies hardly fight each other and there is one simple answer to that, they both want to get reelected, and starting a war is probably not going to get you reelected. Out of all the state vs state wars after 1900, only a very small minority were two democracies fighting each other.

2. Globalization

For the first time ever in human history, people are worth more alive than dead. War is no longer as effective as achieving economic goals now as it has been in the past. Instead of wasting countless of lives and a war that will ravage both economies, it is now better to simply buy the resources from the global market than seizing it by force. People from other states are suddenly more valuable alive than dead, because then they can trade.

3. War was a part of humanity

War was usually the only thing before world war 1 that countries could use should diplomacy and negotiation fail. Today we have multinational treaty that declare all form of aggression illegal and 

armed forces are only legal to be used in self defense, or with permission from the UNSC.

These rules are still broken, but it is now harder to start a war without sparking an international opposition and discontent.

Picture taken from Kurt Gezagt and Wikipedia.